Slovakia’s fundamental tax reform of 2004 considerably improved the simplicity and efficiency of the tax system by eliminating exemptions and special regimes and setting the rates for the personal income tax (PIT), the corporate income tax (CIT) and the value added tax (VAT) all equal to 19%....

Despite a deep recession in 2009 and weak growth in subsequent years, Hungary’s fiscal position compares favourably with many other OECD countries. Nonetheless, the underlying fiscal balance started deteriorating in 2010 and 2011. Recognising this, Hungary’s government launched an ambitious...

The challenge for fiscal policy in Slovakia is to achieve fiscal consolidation in a way which supports the fragile recovery and protects spending on areas which are important for re-embarking on a trajectory of high trend growth and underpinning a catch-up in living standards. While the recently...

The Ramsey approach to optimal taxation and Ramsey tax rules have amassed substance in economic theory. However, they are often criticized on grounds of practicality, fairness, feasibility and some other aspects of designing actual tax policy. This paper presents a collection of these views; it...

Bad policies (i.e., policies harmful to private producers such as excessive taxation, arbitrary confiscation, and negligence of pubic goods) are observed in quite a few countries. These countries tend to have autocratic regimes.I explore a reason why bad policies may benefit autocrats.I present...

Stackelberg differential games are useful settings in which optimal government policies can be studied. This paper argues that the analysis of these games involves a key technical issue. In particular, we question the necessity for optimality of one boundary condition invoked in existing...

This paper examines the relationship between tax structures and economic growth by entering indicators of the tax structure into a set of panel growth regressions for 21 OECD countries, in which both the accumulation of physical and human capital are accounted for. The results of the analysis...

Optimal tax policies in dynamic models have unappealing features. In particular, optimal tax reform typically involves a large initial accumulation of government assets which is responsible for a large part of the welfare gains from optimal tax reform. In this paper, we investigate the...

This paper examines the effect of inequality on growth among the sub- national states in India. Theoretically, growth of the regional economy is driven by productive public investment in the provision of health and education services financed by a linear output tax, and the optimum tax rate is...

We analyse welfare effects of the interactions between the tax system and inflation in Poland and in Ukraine, using the framework developed by Feldstein (1997, 1999). This approach stresses the fact that inflation increases distortions created by the tax system, in particular distortions to...