Tunisia’s tax system has undergone significant structural reforms over the last several decades. Even so, its structure exhibits some major flaws, shortcomings that spill over to and affect the performance of the overall Tunisian economy. Further, the tax system continues to underperform in some fundamental ways, ways that also affect the rest of the economy. Finally, the structure of the Tunis...

This paper discusses methodological principles for social evaluation of tax systems and tax reforms when the concern is primarily turned to who gains and who loses. The discussion is followed by an empirical analysis based on Italian household data. Using a household microeconometric labor supply model we have simulated behavioral responses and welfare gains and losses for married couples resul...

The Czech Republic has over the past decade carried out two waves of tax and benefit reforms. The first one took place in 2005–2006 during the left-wing government and the second one has been carried out in 2008 by the right-wing government. Using EUSILC data for selected types of households, the paper assesses changes in the distribution of gross incomes and effects of the changes in taxes and...

The tax structure in Niger depends heavily on uranium mining and the rest of the formal sector. The slump in uranium prices has reduced tax revenues to 9% of GNP, which is not enough to finance an adequate level of public services. In this paper, tax reforms are considered which will raise more revenue while respecting criteria of equity, efficiency, and growth. The reforms mostly involve exten...

A fundamental property of a progressive income tax is that it provides implicit collective insurance against idiosyncratic shocks to income by dampening the variability of disposable income and consumption. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA) and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) greatly reduced the number of marginal tax brackets and the maximum marginal rate, which limits the abilit...

We examine the effects of coordinated trade-tax reforms and isolated tariff reforms on market access, government revenue and welfare for a small monetary economy, under the assumption that a certain fraction of purchases of each good must be financed with cash held in advance. Moreover, we allow for this fraction of purchases to vary across markets, in the sense that the required amount of mone...

A crucial issue in efficiency-equality evaluations of tax reforms resides in the possibility that the level as well as the distribution of income and welfare may change. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the welfare effects for married couples of replacing the Italian 1993 income tax-transfer system by three alternative hypothetical reforms; a flat tax, a negative tax, and a workfare...

The present paper applies a theoretical two-sector three-factor model to analyze a variety of energy tax reforms with the common feature of at least partly exempting the energy-intensive export sector from the tax. As a result, all scenarios with exemptions reduce energy less than the non-discriminating textbook version of the energy tax. Moreover, in the two scenarios that exemplify typical at...

Current discussions of possible tax reforms are characterized by an increasing relevance of related governments' budgetary implications, thus, in this respect each tax reform proposal is reviewed in detail and an assessment of the consequences is essential from a political point of view. We developed the innovative micro-simulation model ASSERT (Assessing the Effects of Reforms in Taxation), wh...