The Caribbean Community is in transition, moving toward a liberalized trade environment with low tariffs. Tax reform is at the forefront of the policy response since traditional sources of tax revenue such as import duties are on the decline. This paper evaluates the suitability of the VAT to...

This article provides an overview of the religious background of Zakat and the organisation of the Zakat collection in several Islamic countries. Then the mandatory system in Pakistan of Zakat and Ushr is described in more detail. Zakat and Ushr are spent mainly on much targeted areas like...

This article analyzes the distributional impact of the Canadian Goods and Services Tax, which was implemented in 1989, using the Social Policy Simulation and Database, a sophisticated micro-simulation tool developoed by Statistics Canada.

This paper studies the impact of taxation on economic growth of the eight WAEMU countries. Among the critiques addressed to the public sector, numerous are those that refer principally to the negative effects which entail high weight and increasing of taxation. The growth rate can be influenced...

This paper looks at the effects of taxes increase on economic growth of 47 developing countries. In developing countries, there is no magic tax strategy to encourage economic growth. Some countries with high tax burdens have high growth rates and some countries with low tax burdens have low...

Tax reform provides many examples of failures - where reforms did not achieve their objectives successfully and sometimes even had to be reversed. However, value added tax (VAT) in the UK and goods and services tax (GST) in New Zealand have survived successfully for many years. This paper...

Recent attempts of "regionalizing" the VAT, in order to expand fiscal autonomy margins attributed to Regions and to involve them in the hard struggle against tax evasion, strongly urge some considerations on some of the changes introduced in the Italian legal system by the 2001 constitutional...

Government of India introduced Value Added Tax (VAT) across all its states in subsequent stages in the early years of this millennium. The main motive behind this move was to make the commercial tax collection more transparent, accountable and revenue enhancing. The purpose of this paper is to...

In recent years microsimulation models (MSMs) have been increasingly applied in quantitative analyses of the individual impacts of economic and social programme policies. The suitability of using microsimulation as an instrument to analyze main and side policy impacts at the individual level...

The demographic database of Eurostat and of Us Census of Bureau are explored and the main facts are extracted and described. This paper is completely self-standing but is also part of a more general analysis dedicated to the functioning and sustainability of pay-as-you-go to finance the welfare...