We examine the measurement of tax expenditures and offer recommendations aimed at improving their value to analysts and policymakers. We use calculations from NBER’s TAXSIM to illustrate some of the problems with the current methodology for estimating tax expenditures. Unlike most previous...

Cultural policy discussions are increasingly concerned with the creation and restructuring of tax incentives; thus, cultural policy and tax policy are becoming more and more intertwined. With the widely held perception that there has been a general decrease in the availability of direct public...

Botswana’s economy staged an impressive recovery during the past year. The strong economic recovery has helped stabilize financial market conditions. The overall external position has also strengthened. The overriding economic policy challenges are to reduce the size of government...

Social protection in industrial countries has been provided through regulations, tax expenditures, and public spending. This paper argues that globalization will affect governments’ ability to continue providing this social protection at the level of recent decades. Specifically, tax...

In recent years the level of taxation of many developing countries has changed dramatically over relatively short periods. These changes are too large and too sudden to attribute fully to a deterioration in tax administration or to changes in the traditional determinants of tax levels. The paper...

This paper presents a new dataset of fiscal consolidation for 17 OECD economies during 1978-2009. We focus on discretionary changes in taxes and government spending primarily motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by a response to prospective economic conditions. To identify...

Tax reform is a permanent topic of the economic policy debate in Germany. The paper presents a radical reform proposal (as well as a survey of other proposals) and describes some steps towards the realization of the proposal. The tax system proposed mainly consists of a value added tax, a flat...

In the European Union Member States, value-added tax (VAT) is undergoing a continuous process of harmonization, which was initiated in the 1960s by the introduction of the First and Second Council Directives and which resulted in the implementation of the common tax assessment base. Currently,...

The process of fiscal consolidation and the need to step up the poor long term economic performance provide an opportunity to implement tax measures to improve efficiency and rebalance the economy. As consolidation progresses, switching taxes from labour to consumption and property offers an...

In spite of the existence of internationally applied tax quota calculation methodologies there are certain factors which can cause incomparability of the tax quota indicator among countries, and at some circumstances even within a country in time. The inconsistencies in the reported tax quotas...