This paper takes as its starting point Henry Neuburger’s injunction that taxationmust be seen as a contribution to the maintenance of the welfare state, not as adead-weight burden. It sets recent developments in the UK tax ratio in thecontext of changes in public spending, particularly on...

That Britain became more unequal in the last quarter century is well known; the scale of change, less so.At the end of the 1970s, the richest tenth received 21 per cent of total disposable income. This rose to 28-29per cent by 2002-03, as much as the whole of the bottom half. More than half of...

Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-passattempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of productionand efficiency. It answers the question “how much of the cross-country income variance canbe attributed to...

This paper studies public-debt runs under alternative assumptions on the distribution oftaxes among tax bases, the distribution of debt among classes of taxpayers, and thedistributive preferences of the government. Asymmetries in the distribution of taxes--arising, for example, from income-tax...