This paper discusses the interactions between appropriate tax design and international trade, emphasizing issues for developing countries. It sets out the impacts of various taxes on trade and overall economic performance, delineating these effects into those from explicitly trade related taxes (such as tariffs), and the wider set of non trade related taxes such as income, corporate, sales and ...

This study investigates whether personal taxes are related to asset valuations. The effective tax rate of investment income fluctuated considerably since federal income taxes were introduced. The main result of the paper demonstrates that there is an economically and statistically significant relationship between asset valuations and personal tax rates. Stock valuations tend to be higher when t...

whereas public information campaigns have failed to reverse the rising trend in obesity, economists support food taxes as they suggest they can force individuals to change their eating behavior and make the agro-food industry think more about healthy food products. excise taxes based on the unhealthy nutrient content would be more effective since they impact more on unhealthy food products than...

Benhabib and Rustichini [Optimal taxes without commitment, J. Econ. Theory 77 (1997) 231–259] study the properties of optimal capital taxes in economies without commitment and no government debt. They find that capital taxes may be different from zero at steady state. This note shows that, once governments have the possibility of issuing debt and smoothing taxes over time, optimal steady state ...

Both theory and recent trends suggest some optimism for the future of environmentrelated taxes. While new research emphasizes the potentially significant distortions created by environmental taxes and appears to undermine the so-called "double dividend" theory, it also suggests that virtually any environmental policy, including regulations, taxes, and tradable permits, can compound existing dis...

In their recent article Roache and Gostin outline why governments and public health advocates should embrace soda taxes. The evidence is strong and continues to grow: such taxes can change consumer behavior, generate significant revenue and incentivize product reformulation. In essence, such taxes are an important and now well-established instrument of fiscal and public health policy. In this c...

BACKGROUND Taxes on alcohol and tobacco have long been an important means of raising revenues for public spending in many countries but there is increasing interest in using taxes on these, and other unhealthy products, to achieve public health goals. We present a systematic review of the research on health taxes, and aim to generate insights into how such taxes can: (i) reduce consumption of t...

The neglect of administrative issues is a serious limitation of optimal tax theory, with implications for its practical applicability. We focus on an important class of administrative problems, namely that the tax bases are measured with some error. We also consider the full set of tax instruments. We find that consumption taxes can perform the ‘social insurance role of taxation’, a role previo...