The study attempts to estimate the demand for cigarettes in Tanzania and presents simulation results on the effect of the cigarette excise tax on smoking participation, government revenue, and related topics. After briefly summarizing the magnitude and spread of cigarette consumption in the country, the paper reviews some empirical estimates from African and other countries. The 2008 Tanzanian ...

Reducing tax evasion is a priority for many governments. A growing literature argues that verifying taxpayer reports against third-party information is critical for tax collection. However, effectiveness can be limited when tax authorities face constraints to credible enforcement and taxpayers make offsetting adjustments on other margins. We exploit a policy intervention in which Ecuadorian fir...

This paper examines the rationale for the different tax treatment of gasoline and diesel cars currently observed in Europe. First, we analyse possible justifications for a different tax treatment: pure tax revenue considerations, externality considerations and constraints on the tax instruments used for cars and trucks. Next, an applied general equilibrium model is used to assess the welfare ef...

This paper introduces an index of tax optimality that measures the distance of some current tax structure from the optimal tax structure in the presence of public goods. In doing so, we derive a [0, 1] number that reveals immediately how far the current tax configuration is from the optimal one and, thereby, the degree of efficiency of a tax system. We call this number the Tax Optimality Index....

The Government of Cuba established a tax regime for micro-enterprise as soon as it legalized the sector in 1993. It was designed to function in a difficult context in which a tax-paying culture did not exist, in which widespread non-compliance was feared, and in which some micro-entrepreneurs' incomes were high. The tax regime included up-front monthly lump-sum payments, a 10% maximum amount of...

The past academic literature on tax policy has focused almost entirely on the analysis of tax structures in the richest countries, particularly the U.S. Overall the optimal tax models explain reasonably well the observed tax policies in these countries. As summarized in Gordon (2000), for example, past theoretical work suggests that taxes on consumption or labor income should dominate use of ca...

This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of an environmental tax reform in a growing economy. A model of endogenous growth based on human capital accumulation is used to numerically simulate the growth effects of different enironmental tax reforms and compute their impact on welfare in the short and the long-term. Our results suggest that the magnitude of these effects depends on the type ...