Enthusiasts for financial sector tax reform typically come either with some form of"flat tax"(including value added tax on financial services, zero taxation on capital income, or a universal transactions tax) or advocating corrective taxes designed to offset market failures or achieve other...

The paper begins by outlining the major administrative and compliance issues of a cash flow tax. There are problems with the system because of the numerous possibilities for gaming the system. The paper goes on to discuss the problems involved in the transition from a corporate income tax to a...

The aim of this paper is to examine the implications for certain key macroeconomic variables in relation to reductions in public spending. In particular, the paper looks at; the rate of inflation, the interest rate, and the rate of growth of real GNP. The paper develops an intertemporal general...

There are many economic diagnostic tools available which are trying to identify the constraints to economic growth in a given country. Unfortunately these tools tend to provide inconclusive and often conflicting answers as to what the most important constraints are. Even more worrisome, they...

The tax holiday - an incentive frequently used in developing countries to encourage capital investments - offers benefits for short-term investments but could in fact penalize long-term capital investments. For some countries with high inflation rates and relatively fast writeoffs for...

In the past decade the United Kingdom has emerged as a world pacesetter for institutional change in the telecommunications sector. In particular, British Telecom has been divested, price-cap regulation has been introduced, a new regulatory institution (Oftel) has been set up (with its Director...

State capitalism has been a basic tenet of the developing strategy for Turkey for half a century, with import-substituting industrialization through state economic enterprises (SEEs) as a guiding principle. By 1980 a serious economic and political crisis called for a reassessment of economic...

Most economists treat fiscal policy as exogenous and consider policymakers as machines to be programmed. Rarely do they seek to determine why, for instance, some countries rely on the inflation tax while others use direct taxation, let alone what political factors affect such decisions. Yet...

Argentina was a pioneer of infrastructure reform in the early 1990s. The social dimension of infrastructure services was typically overlooked in the reform process. However, social sensitivities often resurfaced in the years that followed, leading to a series of ad hoc social policy measures...

The development of government bond markets and, in particular, their currency composition have recently received much interest, partly because of their relation with financial crises. The authors study the determinants of the size and currency composition of government bond markets for a panel...