Reform Issues in Tax Policy and Tax Administration for Self-reliant Development

Tax Policy Issues in Designing a Carbon Tax

A carbon tax is a promising tool for discouraging the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. In principle, a well-designed tax could reduce the risk of climate change, minimize the cost of emissions reductions, encourage innovation in low-carbon technologies, and raise new public revenue. But designing a real-world carbon tax poses significant challenges. We analyze those challenge...

Development-oriented Tax Policy

No public policy issue is more important than the structure and level of taxes. Governments have fallen because of tax reform. Proposals to extend the value-added tax (VAT) or increase its rates have caused po liti cal agitation in many countries, including Ec ua dor and Mexico. In many less-developed countries, a shortage of funds impedes development eff orts, yet attempts to increase tax reve...

Bush Administration Tax Policy: Distributional Effects

Tax Reform and Poverty

The tax system has a pervasive impact on poverty, both directly through its role in the distribution of society’s resources and indirectly through its effects on the incentives for economic decisions like working and saving. The two most important facets of the tax system for low-income families are payroll taxes and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the former of which levies a tax on earne...

Evaluating International Tax Reform

This paper introduces “capital ownership neutrality” (CON) and “national ownership neutrality” (NON) as benchmarks for evaluating the desirability of international tax reforms, and applies them to analyze recent U.S. tax reform proposals. Tax systems satisfy CON if they do not distort the ownership of capital assets, which promotes global efficiency whenever the productivity of an investment di...