Tax revenue mobilisation: Estimates of South Africa’s personal income tax gap

Tax revenue mobilisation in Ethiopia

Income Tax Buyouts and Income Tax Evasion

A tax buyout is a contract between tax authorities and a tax payer which reduces the marginal income tax rate in exchange for a lump-sum payment. While previous contributions have focussed on labour supply, we consider the interaction with tax evasion and show that a buyout can increase expected tax revenues. This will be the case if (1) the audit probability is constant and the penalty for eva...

Progressivity of Personal Income Tax in Croatia: Decomposition of Tax Base and Rate Effects

This paper presents progressivity breakdowns for Croatian personal income tax (henceforth PIT) in 1997 and 2004. The decompositions reveal how the elements of the system – tax schedule, allowances, deductions and credits – contribute to the achievement of progressivity, over the quantiles of pre-tax income distribution. Through the use of ‘single parameter’ Gini indices, the social decision mak...

Underground Economy And Tax Gap

The choice of the personal income tax base

Following Mirrlees (1971) and Vickrey (1945), the optimal tax literature has studied the design of a personal income tax where the ideal would be to tax unobserved earnings ability but instead the only available information is actual earnings. In practice, though, taxes depend on a broader range of information about each individual than earnings. In principle, this supplementary information can...