This paper extends previous work presented at the SABE/IAREP conference at St Mary’s University, Halifax (James, 2009). In the earlier paper it was shown that conventional economic theory is used to make the case for tax reform but does not always adequately incorporate all the relevant...

The topic of multi-level taxation is currently highly relevant to two issues – European tax harmonisation and local government taxation in the UK. This paper presents a general economic analysis of multi-level government and taxation and the characteristics that might make a particular tax...

Tax compliance is likely to become even more important with developments such as self-assessment and electronic commerce. This paper re-examines the meaning of tax compliance. It finds that existing definitions are usually too narrow to encompass the topic in full and a wider definition is...

Simplicity is an important attribute for a tax system and there have been many attempts at simplification in different countries including, of course, Australia. However these attempts have not been very successful. The main reason is that there are, of course, important factors that cause tax...

The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) generated a natural experiment in which UK universities strove to achieve the best results they could for their research and teaching. A review of the two exercises and a discussion of the relationship between...

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...

An annotated bibliography of tax compliance and tax compliance costs.