FUNDAMENTAL TAX REFORM: PUBLIC PERCEPTION AND POLITICAL RHETORIC

Environmental Tax Reform: Efficiency and Political Feasibility

Command-and-control measures, despite their inefficiencies, are still the standard in environmental policy. This might be due to the fact that command-and-control instruments prevent monetary redistribution between sectors and households and leave property rights on remaining pollution with the emittents. The present paper interprets the no-redistribution policy as a political constraint and in...

Might Fundamental Tax Reform Increase Criminal Activity?

There is a widely held perception that fundamental tax reform would reduce the level of criminal and other “underground” economic activity. The popular argument relies on the idea that replacing the income tax with a sales tax would implicitly tax the return to criminal activity, whereas the return to crime is effectively untaxed by an income tax. This paper finds instead that the impact of tax...

Simulating Fundamental Tax Reform in the U.S

This paper uses a new, large-scale, dynamic life-cycle simulation model to compare the welfare and macroeconomic effects of five fundamental alternatives to the U.S. federal income tax: a proportional income tax, a proportional consumption tax, a flat tax, a flat tax with transition relief, and a progressive variant of the flat tax called the X tax. The model incorporates intragenerational hete...

THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF FUNDAMENTAL TAX REFORM bY

Political Constraints and Public Support for Market Reform

As concerns of “reform fatigue” in lowerand middle-income countries have become more widespread, so has the search for ways of boosting support for market-oriented reforms. Although the effects of political institutions on reform results have been extensively analyzed, there has been relatively little investigation of their effects on public opinion. We argue that constitutional and extra-const...