This paper examines the historical evolution of China's rural taxation system and provides an initial assessment of the ongoing rural tax reform. It is argued that the issue of rural taxation and local governance in China is one typical challenge arising from the inherent tension between an increasingly liberalized economic system and a still centralized political system. Though the rural tax r...

This paper analyzes whether a corporate tax cut reduces profit shifting to low-tax countries. I use firm-level data of 2,812 German corporations around the Business Tax Reform in 2008. Applying a difference-in-differences framework with a one-onone matching strategy, which compares earnings of multinational and domestic corporations, I do not find empirical evidence that even a 10 percentage po...

The current consensus on indirect tax reform in developing countries favors a reduction in trade taxes with an increase in VAT to raise revenue. The theoretical results on selective reform that underlie this consensus are, however, derived from partial models that ignore the existence of an informal economy. Once the incomplete coverage of VAT due to an informal economy is acknowledged, we show...

China enacted a rural tax reform known as the “Tax-for-Fee Reform” (TFR) in the late 1990s, in large part driven by an attempt to address farmers’ complaints about their perception of a heavy tax burden. A crucial but unanswered question is whether this reform actually improved farmers’ welfare. This paper applies several estimation methods, including both cross-sectional propensity score match...

This paper analyses the impact of the corporate tax reform introduced in Italy at the beginning of 2004 on firms’ tax burden. For this purpose we develop a microsimulation model reproducing the Italian corporate tax system. The model is based on an integrated dataset combining ISTAT (Italian Institute of Statistics) survey data on enterprises and company accounts, for the year 2000. The empiric...

In exploring the impact of tax policy on labor-market performance, the paper first investigates how tax reform impacts labor supply and equilibrium unemployment in representative agent models. The impact of tax policy on labor market performance depends importantly on various other labor-market institutions, such as minimum wage laws, wage bargaining, and unemployment benefits. In non-competiti...

The property tax is an important local revenue source in many countries, but it is often underused as a source for financing local expenditures. In India, many local governments have initiated administrative and valuation reforms to increase the yield from property taxes. In this paper, we examine the fiscal and distributional implication of the ongoing and potential assessment reforms in two I...

This paper examines elements of British tax policy and discusses their implications for the US, where several recent proposals would mirror aspects of the British system. These include reducing filing requirements under the individual income tax, indexing capital gains for inflation, cutting mortgage interest deductions, enacting a value added tax, and integrating the corporate and personal inc...