This study tries to look at how 'open' Indian states are with respect to international trade and then try to characterise the relationship between regional disparity and 'openness'. The major purpose of this work is to develop an openness index at the regional or state level. It is well...

This paper extends behavioural microsimulation modelling so that third round effects of a policy change can be simulated. The first round effects relate to fixed hours of work, while second round effects allow for changes in desired hours of work at unchanged wages. These allow for endogenous...

The competitive allocation of labor across different sectors of an economy may not be socially optimal when one sector uses foreign capital. We argue that a suitably designed government intervention is required to restrict the sectors to their optimal size and maximize national welfare. Such a...

This paper reports estimates of the elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net-of-tax rate for New Zealand taxpayers. The relative stability of the New Zealand personal income tax system, in terms of marginal rates, thresholds and the tax base, provides helpful conditions for deriving...

This paper considers the extent to which the standard argument, that the disproportionate excess burden of taxation suggests the use of tax-smoothing in the face of future cost increases, is modified by uncertainty regarding the future. The role of uncertainty and risk aversion are examined...

This paper explores, in the context of the Atkinson inequality measure, attempts to make interpretations of orders of magnitude transparent. One suggestion is that the analogy of sharing a cake among a very small number of people provides a useful intuitive description for people who want some...

The aim of this paper is to provide an introduction to the concept of user cost and its determinants. Particular attention is given to the influence of taxation. The concept of user cost relates to the rental, the rate of return to capital, that arises in a profit maximising situation in which...

This paper examines the optimal time path of the tax rate, in a model where an increasing ratio of government debt to GDP is projected in the absence of policy changes.

This paper sets out the alternative approaches to the public sector discount rate and explains the assumptions involved. There are two main ways of thinking about the discount rate. First, the social opportunity cost of capital approach (SOC) defines the discount rate as the rate of return that...