Book review: Tax Reforms: Experiences and Perspectives

Book Review: Cuba's Aborted Reforms

This book consists of six substantive and relatively independent chapters addressing various aspects of Cuba’s economic system, the policies that have governed its functioning and potential changes in the near future. While the first chapter provides a historical overview of the policies followed by the Castro regime between 1960 and 2004, the last chapter focuses attention on possible future r...

Book Review Perspectives

Socially-Efficient Tax Reforms∗

We propose graphical methods to determine whether commodity-tax changes are “socially efficient”, in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. We also derive estimators of critical poverty lines and economic efficiency ratios which can be used to characterize socially-efficient tax reforms. The statistical properties of ...

Tax Reforms and Evidence of Transfer Pricing

The manipulation of transfer prices changes the relative tax burdens multinational firms face in their different countries of operation and may even reduce a firm’s worldwide tax payments. At the same time, transfer price manipulation will often trigger changes in the tariffs that are levied on intra-company imports. For this reason, when tax rates change, as they did for many countries during ...

Poverty-Reducing Tax Reforms with Heterogeneous Agents

The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household size and composition, temporal or spatial variation in price indices, and individual needs and “merits”.