The 'Henry tax review', Australia's Future Tax System (2010), recommended that royalties be abolished and replaced by a resource rent tax. Regarding abolition, AFTS drew on KPMG Econtech (2010a), a report commissioned by Treasury to investigate the efficiencies of a wide range of Australian...

The Australian Treasury contracted KPMG Econtech (2010) to estimate the efficiency cost of Australian taxes, using the MM900 Computable General Equilibrium model. The resultant report, endorsed by Treasury, was a major input into the Henry report into AustraliaÂ’s Future Tax System (AFTS) and...

In 2010-11 over $45 billion GST monies, and about $24b of other grants, will be distributed between the States and Territories on the recommendation of the Commonwealth Grants Commission. The Commission is instructed to implement Horizontal Fiscal Equalisation (HFE); and not to be concerned with...

Since The Calculus of Consent (1962), Public Choice has had little influence on the course of public policy in Australia and, in particular, virtually none on the seismic shift from a policy regime antagonistic to competition, to one that gives conditional approval. Competition, of the...

A small but important part of Buchanan's work is focussed on issues relating to federalism. This includes the early equalisation grants paper (from his doctoral dissertation), the midcareer papers on Tiebout processes and the later paper on fiscal cartels in The Power to Tax (1980). The aim of...

This paper presents estimates of the financial returns to the graduate, to the Treasury and to the Australian economy from undergraduate education. In addition, the paper indulges in some speculations about the efficiency of the policy changes.

This paper re-examines criticisms made of vertical fiscal imbalance in Australian and other federations. We argue that one of the central criticisms made of vertical fiscal imbalance is unproven. Vertical fiscal imbalance occurs when the central government collects more taxes than it spends on...