Early in the life of Australia's income tax, the government, sensitive to loss of taxation revenue through artificial arrangements to divert taxable profits from individuals to companies where they would be taxed more lightly, saw fit to provide a special taxation regime for closely held...

In this article, we examine the design and administration of Excess Profits Duty (EPD), introduced in the UK in 1915. This represented a significant innovation as the country's first comprehensive attempt to tax 'excessive' business profits. EPD was a complex tax which had two objectives: to...

When first introduced in 1712, and throughout the eighteenth century, the stamp duty on newspapers was primarily intended as a revenue raising measure with censorship as a subsidiary, but not unintended, by-product (Sadler & Oats, 2002). In the nineteenth century the stamp duty became known,...