There are by now vast academic literatures on both tax compliance and the underground economy. These literatures provide estimates of the overall degrees of non-compliance and shadow (or hidden) activity as well as numerous insights into their causes and consequences. However, we believe it is...

This paper concerns the use of presumptive taxation methods in taxing the hard to tax, which is a subset of presumptive taxation more generally. Since other papers are concerned with the concept of the “hard to tax”, I will not dwell on it, beyond noting that it is rooted in the...

Local income data is an important economic indicator, widely used in a broad range of studies related to regional convergence, urban economics, fiscal federalism, housing and spatial analysis. Despite its importance, there is a lack of official data on local incomes and, most importantly, on...

This paper focuses on the evolving pattern of fiscal decentralization and its impact on the growth of per capita GDP of the districts in Nepal. The dependent variable is the growth of the per capita district agricultural GDP, which is, used as a proxy for the annual growth of per capita district...

This chapter provides an overview of the key issues in public economics arising from the process of territorial decentralisation that has taken place in Spain since the restoration of democracy and the Constitution of 1978, and which resulted in the emergence of the “Autonomic State”. The...

In this chapter we analyze the reform and evolution of consumption taxes in Spain over recent decades, paying particular attention to the new developments stemming from the introduction of the VAT in 1986 and the modifications carried out to excise taxes in order to bring the Spanish tax system...

A nation’s fiscal transfer system has many facets. Usually, the central government has several objectives in transferring funds to local government . Individual local governments often have objectives that conflict with the central government and with other one another. This paper looks at the...

This paper discusses the concepts of vertical fiscal imbalance (the fiscal gap) and horizontal fiscal imbalance (equalization) and uses several statistics to measure these concepts for eight industrially developed federations: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and...

Governments decentralize for various political and economic reasons. It can be a means to move decision making closer to people, to enhance the efficiency and responsiveness of service delivery, and to make tax systems more productive. In some countries, it may also promote national cohesion...

In this chapter we describe and assess the Spanish experience with environmental taxes in the last several decades, and formulate several suggestions for future developments in this area of tax reform. We first deal with the theoretical and policy contexts for environmental taxes and the...