natural resources, are important determinants of tax revenue. …

vastly in tax matters, and in ways that are less than fully understood; that the history of ‘big ideas’ in guiding tax …

This paper addresses two fundamental issues in indirect tax design. It first revisits the case for reduced rates on … rate on a broad base†is always good tax policy—may plausibly be large even at a low nominal tax rate and with few …

periods. These changes are too large and too sudden to attribute fully to a deterioration in tax administration or to changes … in the traditional determinants of tax levels. The paper argues that they should be attributed mostly to macroeconomic … policies. The paper discusses the connection between tax levels and (a) the real value of the official exchange rate, (b …

Year-ahead forecasts of tax revenues incorporated into IMF programs for low-income countries, from 1993 to 1999, are … percent. Forecasts of tax revenues as a percentage of GDP were biased upwards, but there was no significant bias in forecasts … of nominal tax revenues. Upward bias in the tax revenue forecasts was associated with subsequent interruptions to the …

This paper examines the role of tax administration in developing countries from an economic perspective. The … traditional separation of tax policy and tax administration in the literature is shown to break down in developing countries …, where tax administrators decide in what manner complicated tax legislation should actually be applied. After surveying …

Starting in the early 1990s, the Baltics, Russia, and other (BRO) countries of the former Soviet Union initiated tax … lowering of the top marginal income tax rate would significantly benefit economic development and increase tax compliance, have … initiated a new stage of tax reforms. This paper reviews country experiences and suggests that (i) overall, there seems to be …

This paper studies an optimal tax problem for a small open economy where collecting taxes is costly. It is shown that …, in the presence of collection costs modeled as an increasing function of the tax rate: (a) the standard rules of optimal … domestic taxes as a second-best revenue-raising device; and (c) the optimal tariff/tax structure may be uniform rather than …

This paper provides an overview of the key economic factors that shape tax policy reform in many high-income countries … respect to tax rates and revenue ratios over the last some 20 years, and discusses selected structural reform initiatives that … with the restructuring of corporate tax, the impact of corporate taxes on FDI, key reform initiatives including dual income …