In the context of the current tax policy debate in the United States, this paper reviews and discusses some of the main recurrent themes, as well as some of the most important tax reform proposals put forward over the past two decades. It finds that although there seems to be widespread...

Global economic integration intensified tax competition and raised concerns about the resulting "race to the bottom", which could undermine public investment and social spending. The aim of this paper is to test predictions that (i) there is interdependence in CIT rate setting in Eastern Europe...

This paper analyzes developments in non-oil tax policy, administration, and revenues in Azerbaijan, and suggests measures for further improvement. The main finding is that Azerbaijan's non-oil tax revenues increased significantly as a share of non-oil GDP in the last five years, but remain below...

A tax on gross assets has been introduced in some developing countries where several factors (most notably, high inflation) enabled apparently viable enterprises to report losses for income tax purposes. The idea of a tax on the value of assets, rather than on the income that the assets...

This paper reviews the tax policy debate in the United States on the move of the corporation tax from its present worldwide basis to a territorial basis, and considers the implications for the United States and the rest of the world. It finds that there is no clear view on whether the move would...

We investigate the relation between changes in tax composition and long-run economic growth using a new dataset covering a broad cross-section of countries with different income levels. We specifically consider 69 countries with at least 20 years of observations on total tax revenue during the...

This paper provides a conceptual overview of economists’ attempts to learn about the effects of taxes on extractive resources. The emphasis is on research methods and techniques, with no attempt to provide a comprehensive tabulation of previous empirical results or policy conclusions...

This paper addresses two fundamental issues in indirect tax design. It first revisits the case for reduced rates on items especially important to the poor, establishing conditions under which even very crudely targeted spending measures better serve their interests. It then explores the welfare...

We present a simple model of petroleum exploration and development that can be applied to study the performance of alternative tax systems and identify potential distortions. Although the model is a highly simplified, it incorporates many factors and some of the key tradeoffs that would...

São Tomé and Príncipe is very open and highly depends on imports resulting in high indirect tax revenue. At the same time, the production and export base are very narrow, leaving the authorities with a small domestic tax base. For these reasons, the country compares unfavorably with...