U.K. guidelines on the introduction of new regulations require that politicians and civil servants should “think small first” when deciding whether and how to introduce new regulations that affect business. Similar guidelines are currently being adopted across the EU. This paper presents the...

The principles of business taxation are governed by the Adam Smith’s fourth canon of taxation : ‘every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the treasury of the state’. However,...