Governments, including Canada’s, offer tax benefits to small businesses, such as lower rates, in the belief that these benefits encourage growth, but these attempts can easily have the opposite effect. Small businesses that face steep “tax walls,” meaning a sudden and sharp increase in tax...

To put it in simple terms, Canada’s corporate income tax is a mess. It discourages capital investment most heavily in many service sectors, is highly distortionary and overwhelmingly complex, impeding economic growth. With current inflation rates, these distortions are even larger. With so...

The 22 papers in this volume illustrate the itinerary of Henry Tulkens on the occasion of his retirement from teaching. The volume presents contemporary analysis of Tulkens' classic papers on public sector economics. The collection is structured in four parts: I. Decentralized resource...

The Canadian personal income tax system does not pay much attention to whether the amount of money an individual brings home is supplemented by the income of a spouse or not. That means that families where one spouse earns more than the other get taxed at a higher rate than families where two...

In a world without taxes, investors that take over companies would do so because they expect to be able to operate the business efficiently and at a high rate of return. But in Canada today, some acquirers enjoy tax advantages over others. And that could mean that certain buyers, who may not be...

For a government's fiscal program to best serve the public interest, while also ensuring sufficient public revenue collection, it has to meet three criteria: efficiency, simplicity and fairness. Unfortunately, the royalty and tax system currently in place for Saskatchewan's robust potash-mining...