The BEPS project would, it was said, establish 'a fundamentally new set of standards designed to establish international coherence in corporate income taxation.' While many of the items in the Action Plan are better described as tinkering, item 2 was directed to 'international coherence in...

Australian tax drafting is now a small distinctive enclave within the larger realm of legislative drafting because the tax system has been chosen as the site for a novel drafting project. This has been done in the apparent belief that changing the choice and organisation of words within the tax...

In a number of high-income countries over the past few decades there has been a large growth in income inequality and at the same time a shift in the burden of taxation from the top to the middle of the income distribution. This paper applies the theory of optimal piecewise linear taxation to...

In the 1980s the Australian Personal Income Tax was highly progressive and family payments were universal. The system ranked well in terms of gender equity and female labour supply incentives. During the Howard years the progressivity of the rate scale declined dramatically despite rising...

We provide a critique of the standard methodology which bases welfare comparisons between households on deflating household income and consumption by an equivalence scale. We argue that this leads to support for tax/transfer policies that significantly disadvantage low to middle income...

This paper presents the properties of optimal piecewise linear income tax systems for families based on joint and individual incomes respectively. It models the interaction between the wage rates of mothers as "second earners" and variation in child care prices and productivities as determinants...