Any government is interested in knowing, to a certain extent degree, the level of tax revenue at a given time in order to design public expenditures. On the other hand, this level of budget revenue is desirable to be sustainable, i.e. to be supported by the existing economi c conditions at a...

This paper presents a model to determine the tax effort and tax capacity of 113 countries and the main variables on which they depend. The results and the model allow a clear determination of which countries are near their tax capacity and which are some way from it, and therefore, could...

We apply non-linear error-correction models to the empirical testing of the sustainability of the government's intertemporal budget constraint. Our empirical analysis, based on Italy, shows that the Italian government is meeting its intertemporal budget constraint, in spite of the high levels of...

Economic policy interventions of a scale as effected in eastern Germany can be expected to have a significant impact on the economy, which may be in accordance with the objectives of the policy measures or manifest itself in distortions of several kinds. This paper analyzes the structural...

We study the effect of inflowing remittances - a major source of capital for many countries - on tax-revenues and tax-policy. Instrumenting remittances with changes in the oil-price interacted with a country's distance to oil-producing countries, we find that remittances have a large positive...

I consider a model in which an autocrat can invest in fiscal capacity and thus be able to tax his subjects (citizens). Investment in fiscal capacity is costless but comes with a demand for fiscal accountability by the citizens, something akin to the spirit of the slogan "no taxation without...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of how the frequency and severity of terrorism affectgovernment revenue and expenditure during the period 1970-2013 using a panel dataset on153 countries. We find that terrorism has only a marginal negative effect on tax revenueperformance, after...

This paper analyzes the scope for systematic rules-based fiscal activism in open economies. Relative to a balanced budget rule, automatic stabilizers significantly improve welfare. But they minimize fiscal instrument volatility rather than business cycle volatility. A more aggressively...

Declining inflation rates might have negative consequences for tax revenues. Phenomena like the inflationary bracket creep in a progressive income tax system do not work any longer. With this background the paper analyzes the extent of fiscal drag for OECD countries since 1965. Some...

The existing empirical literature on the US federal revenue-expenditure nexus has had mixed findings. Amongst those papers presenting evidence in favor of causation running from taxes to expenditures, support for the conventional, Friedman-type tax-spend hypothesis is nearly ubiquitous. Evidence...