This paper reviews the literature on the costs of VAT, beginning with a review of concepts with regard to different aspects of administrative and compliance costs and then a review of quantitative estimates of such costs. It concludes with a brief discussion of VAT non-compliance and fraud with...

This paper examines the potential tradeo between economic growth and income inequality in the design of tax structure by using a structural model and a large panel data set of 150 developed and developing countries for the period 1970-2009. Tax structure, which is treated as an endogenous...

The aim of this paper is to analyse cross-country differences in the degree of inter-regional redistribution achieved by means of taxes and expenditures in 21 European countries over the period 1995-2009. We rely on a standard approach based on the observation and comparison of both primary and...

Governments arguably exist in part to cope with such weaknesses of their citizens as those arising from infirmity, ignorance, and irrationality. At the same time, however, governments themselves partly subsist on the strength of such other popular ‘weaknesses’ as smoking, drinking, gambling,...

We study the dynamic output and welfare effects of public infrastructure investment under a balanced budget fiscal rule, using an overlapping generations model of a small open economy. The government finances public investment by employing distortionary labor taxes. We find a negative short-run...

Developing countries face considerable challenges in the design and operation of local infrastructure planning systems in decentralized or decentralizing countries. Many of these are well documented, but the complex political economy environment in which planning evolves has received...

Municipal amalgamation is often seen as one way to ensure that municipalities are large enough to be financially and technically capable of providing the extensive array of services with which they are charged. The idea is presumably that municipalities will be able not only to reap economies of...

This paper examines how a scal equalization system a ects the disciplining e ect of competition for capital among heterogeneous regions in a decentralized economy. I build a model in which regions that are heterogeneous in initial endowments try to attract capital by competing public input that...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency cost of transfers. To this end, we develop a model of individual demand decisions about the provision of a regional public good that encompasses a continuum of tax/transfers scenarios to finance regional public expenditure. We assume that...