Climate change is an externality problem—so the challenges that arise in limiting it and dealing with the effects that remain are largely fiscal. The structure of the problem, however, and the uncertainty which surrounds it, make the design of proper policy responses particularly complex. This...

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the theory of international tax competition. Starting with the standard framework, it visits the non-cooperative equilibrium of tax competition, analyses aspects of partial and regional coordination, repeated interaction, stock-flow-effects,...

A key feature of the recent EU and OECD standards for good behavior in international taxation is a presumption against preferential tax regimes (such as those offering advantageous treatment to non-residents or enterprises not active in the domestic market), which are seen as especially...

This paper aims to establish and explore the links between two threads in the public finance literature. One is the use of tax thresholds to partition taxpayers into those who are liable to pay tax and those who are not. The other is the notion of ‘informality’ as a central challenge for tax...

This paper explores the role of trade instruments in globally efficient climate policies, focusing on whether or not some form of border tax adjustment (BTA) is warranted when carbon prices differ internationally. The analysis shows that, while there is no case for BTA when all instruments can...

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

This paper establishes, in a very general setting, necessary and sufficient conditions for harmonization of economic policies to be welfare-improving. As an application, it is shown that under circumstances in which harmonization is known to be welfare-improving when taxes are levied on a...

In this paper, the authors reconcile and extend previous results on the collectively optimal taxation of international investment income. The 'weighted average' rule of T. Horst (1980), for example, is shown to rest on unattractive assumptions on the set of instruments available, ruling out any...