The last two centuries have seen the rise of the nation-state as the dominant political institution around the world. During this period, the colonial empires of varying duration and reach created first by the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch, then the French and British, then the Germans and...

This paper examines the challenges Madagascar has faced in decentralizing government activity since its independence in 1960. This is of interest as we will show that it has been plagued by a series of misstarts down that path. The paper is divided in three parts. The first one summarizes the...

“Will underdeveloped countries learn to tax?” asked Nicholas Kaldor (1963), forty years ago. Underlying this question is the assumption that if a country wishes to become ‘developed’ it needs to collect in taxes an amount greater than the 10-15 percent found in many developing countries....

This paper first restates the lessons to be learned from Richard Musgrave’s pioneering discussion of the tax assignment issue. Next, it considers subsequent developments in the theory of fiscal federalism related to the issue of tax assignment. Surprisingly little clear guidance is offered by...

Fiscal experts have years proposed a holy trinity of tax reform options for developing countries: broader bases, lower rates, and better administration. The review in this paper of fifty years of experience auggests that what might be called the BBLR approach-- broader bases and lower rates --...

In developed countries, the income tax, especially the personal income tax, has long been viewed as the primary instrument for redistributing income and wealth. This article examines whether it makes sense for developing countries to rely on the income tax for redistributive purposes. We put...

The biggest tax story of the last third of the 20 th century was the value-added tax (VAT). From its tentative beginnings in the reform of the French production tax in the early 1950s, by August 2000 some form of VAT existed in at least 123 countries. Few fiscal innovations have been adopted so...

China is the world’s most populous country. For some years, China has sustained a remarkably fast rate of economic growth. Despite the forests of construction cranes so often noted by visiting foreigners, however, China remains to a surprising extent a rural country, with only about one-third...

The GCT and SCT are critically important revenue sources in Jamaica, accounting for 37.4 percent of total revenues in fiscal year 2003/04 (27.7 percent for GCT alone) and an estimated 11.2 percent of GDP (8.3 percent for GCT alone). In this paper we set out in some detail the present structure...