Abstract
A common objection to “sin taxes”—corrective taxes on goods that are thought to be overconsumed, such as cigarettes, alcohol, and sugary drinks—is that they often fall disproportionately on ...low-income consumers. This paper studies the interaction between corrective and redistributive motives in a general optimal taxation framework and delivers empirically implementable formulas for sufficient statistics for the optimal commodity tax. The optimal sin tax is increasing in the price elasticity of demand, increasing in the degree to which lower-income consumers are more biased or more elastic to the tax, decreasing in the extent to which consumption is concentrated among the poor, and decreasing in income effects, because income effects imply that commodity taxes create labor supply distortions. Contrary to common intuitions, stronger preferences for redistribution can increase the optimal sin tax, if lower-income consumers are more responsive to taxes or are more biased. As an application, we estimate the optimal nationwide tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, using Nielsen Homescan data and a specially designed survey measuring nutrition knowledge and self-control. Holding federal income tax rates constant, our estimates imply an optimal federal sugar-sweetened beverage tax of 1 to 2.1 cents per ounce, although optimal city-level taxes could be as much as 60% lower due to cross-border shopping.
This book describes how a social-norms model of taxation rose and fell in British-ruled Palestine and the State of Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Such a model, in which non-legal means were ...used to foster compliance, appeared in the tax system created by the Jewish community in 1940s Palestine and was later adopted by the new Israeli state in the 1950s. It gradually disappeared in subsequent decades as law and its agents, lawyers and accountants, came to play a larger role in the process of taxation. By describing the historical interplay between formal and informal tools for creating compliance, Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel sheds new light on our understanding of the relationship between law and other methods of social control, and reveals the complex links between taxation and citizenship.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the US system of public finance underwent a dramatic transformation. The late nineteenth-century regime of indirect, hidden, partisan, and regressive taxes was ...eclipsed in the early twentieth century by a direct, transparent, professionally administered, and progressive tax system. This book uncovers the contested roots and paradoxical consequences of this fundamental shift in American tax law and policy. It argues that the move toward a regime of direct and graduated taxation marked the emergence of a new fiscal polity - a new form of statecraft that was guided not simply by the functional need for greater revenue but by broader social concerns about economic justice, civic identity, bureaucratic capacity, and public power. Between the end of Reconstruction and the onset of the Great Depression, the intellectual, legal, and administrative foundations of the modern fiscal state first took shape. This book explains how and why this new fiscal polity came to be.
Die Verbesserung der Streitbeilegungsmechanismen ist ein zentraler Bestandteil der Arbeiten zu BEPS. Die unter Aktionspunkt 14 des BEPS-Projekts erarbeiteten Maßnahmen, die in diesem Bericht ...behandelt werden, sollen die Gefahr von Rechtsunsicherheiten und unbeabsichtigter Doppelbesteuerung auf ein Mindestmaß begrenzen. Dies erreichen sie, indem sie die einheitliche und ordnungsgemäße Umsetzung von Doppelbesteuerungsabkommen gewährleisten, einschließlich der wirksamen und zügigen Beilegung von Streitigkeiten über deren Auslegung oder Anwendung im Rahmen des Verständigungsverfahrens. Die Staaten haben wesentlichen Änderungen in ihrem Ansatz zur Streitbeilegung zugestimmt, u.a. mit einem Mindeststandard für die Beilegung abkommensbezogener Streitigkeiten. Sie haben sich zu dessen schneller Umsetzung sowie zur Gewährleistung einer wirksamen Implementierung durch Einrichtung eines stabilen Überwachungsmechanismus nach dem Peer-Review-Verfahren verpflichtet. Zudem hat sich eine große Gruppe von Staaten bereit erklärt, in ihren bilateralen Doppelbesteuerungsabkommen ein obligatorisches, verbindliches Schiedsverfahren vorzusehen, das die Beilegung abkommensbezogener Streitigkeiten innerhalb eines bestimmten Zeitrahmens gewährleistet.
The article analyzes the features of regional economy in the South of Russia, which is characterized by the diversity of agricultural enterprises. The paper shows that enterprises of the ...agro-industrial complex tend to integration in order to ensure the continuity of agricultural processes. The article studies the factors of regional development as an objective precondition for the formation of highly efficient clusters in the agro-industrial complex. The author proves that implementing the continuous scenario of the economy development and import substitution process is caused by a number of reasons including a low reaction rate to changes in market conditions; difficulties in obtaining loans; high tariffs for the transportation of agricultural products; changes in taxation. The paper determines that uniting agricultural enterprises in the agro-industrial cluster provides system benefits and guarantees a synergistic effect in the following forms: transforming the sectoral structure in the agro-industrial complex; creating the conditions for simultaneous improvement of performance indicators in cluster enterprises and administrative-territorial entities, within which enterprises are located; the organization of the agro-industrial cluster as a closed contour and, through this, reducing total costs and optimizing taxation of cluster enterprises; creating the mechanism of effective interaction with territorial authorities in implementing the regional import substitution policy; expanding access to new technologies and staff training in order to respond faster to changing market conditions in accordance with the requirements of the modern economy.
This paper derives optimal inheritance tax formulas that capture the key equity-efficiency trade-off, are expressed in terms of estimable sufficient statistics, and are robust to the underlying ...structure of preferences. We consider dynamic stochastic models with general and heterogeneous bequest tastes and labor productivities. We limit ourselves to simple but realistic linear or two-bracket tax structures to obtain tractable formulas. We show that long-run optimal inheritance tax rates can always be expressed in terms of aggregate earnings and bequest elasticities with respect to tax rates, distributional parameters, and social preferences for redistribution. Those results carry over with tractable modifications to (a) the case with social discounting (instead of steady-state welfare maximization), (b) the case with partly accidental bequests, (c) the standard Barro—Becker dynastic model. The optimal tax rate is positive and quantitatively large if the elasticity of bequests to the tax rate is low, bequest concentration is high, and society cares mostly about those receiving little inheritance. We propose a calibration using micro-data for France and the United States. We find that, for realistic parameters, the optimal inheritance tax rate might be as large as 50%—60%—or even higher for top bequests, in line with historical experience.
The financial burden imposed upon the Chinese farmer by local taxes has become a major source of discontent in the Chinese countryside and a worrisome source of political and social instability for ...the Chinese government. Bernstein and Lü examine the forms and sources of heavy, informal taxation, and shed light on how peasants defend their interests by adopting strategies of collective resistance (both peaceful and violent). Bernstein and Lü also explain why the central government, while often siding with the peasants, has not been able to solve the burden problem by instituting a sound, reliable financial system in the countryside. While the regime has, to some extent, sought to empower farmers to defend their interests - by informing them about tax rules, expanding the legal system, and instituting village elections, for example, these attempts have not yet generated enough power from 'below' to counter powerful, local official agencies.
Taxes dominate contemporary American politics. Yet while many rail against big government, few Americans are prepared to give up the benefits they receive from the state. InTax and Spend, historian ...Molly C. Michelmore examines an unexpected source of this contradiction and shows why many Americans have come to hate government but continue to demand the security it provides. Tracing the development of taxing and spending policy over the course of the twentieth century, Michelmore uncovers the origins of today's antitax and antigovernment politics in choices made by liberal state builders in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. By focusing on two key instruments of twentieth-century economic and social policy, Aid to Families with Dependent Children and the federal income tax,Tax and Spendexplains the antitax logic that has guided liberal policy makers since the earliest days of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. Grounded in careful archival research, this book reveals that the liberal social compact forged during the New Deal, World War II, and the postwar years included not only generous social benefits for the middle class-including Social Security, Medicare, and a host of expensive but hidden state subsidies-but also a commitment to preserve low taxes for the majority of American taxpayers. In a surprising twist on conventional political history, Michelmore's analysis links postwar liberalism directly to the rise of the Republican right in the last decades of the twentieth century. Liberals' decision to reconcile public demand for low taxes and generous social benefits by relying on hidden sources of revenues and invisible kinds of public subsidy, combined with their persistent defense of taxpayer rights and suspicion of "tax eaters" on the welfare rolls, not only fueled but helped create the contours of antistate politics at the core of the Reagan Revolution.
Social scientists teach that politicians favor groups that are organized over those that are not. Representation Through Taxation challenges this conventional wisdom. Emphasizing that there are ...limits to what organized interests can credibly promise in return for favorable treatment, Gehlbach shows that politicians may instead give preference to groups – organized or not. Gehlbach develops this argument in the context of the postcommunist experience, focusing on the incentive of politicians to promote sectors that are naturally more tax compliant, regardless of their organization. In the former Soviet Union, tax systems were structured around familiar revenue sources, magnifying this incentive and helping to prejudice policy against new private enterprise. In Eastern Europe, in contrast, tax systems were created to cast the revenue net more widely, encouraging politicians to provide the collective goods necessary for new firms to flourish.
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