In 2006, State Health Agencies and its Health Platforms were established in each of Austria?s nine federal states. One of the goals was to improve planning, controlling and financing of the health system by overcoming sectoral boundaries. To achieve this funds may be earmarked ("reform pool") to compensate for shifts in service provision between health care settings (see also survey (7) 2006). ...

Our aim in this paper is to introduce and defend a distinction that is often blurred in public debate about tax policy, and whose recognition would clarify the relation between disputes about taxes and disputes about social justice. Political conservatives usually argue for lower taxes on the ground that they are against big government. They often favor the reduction of government-run and gover...

Increases in Social Security taxes during the past decade or so have prompted frequent comparisons of Social Security taxes and Federal personal income taxes. In this article, new evidence is brought to bear on this issue. Two specific questions are addressed: For 1979, what percentage of family units paid more in Social Security tax than in Federal income tax? How did this relationship between...

Excise taxes on sugary beverages have been proposed as a method to replicate the public health success of tobacco control and to generate revenue. As policymakers increase efforts to pass sugary beverage taxes, they can anticipate that manufacturers will emulate the strategies employed by tobacco companies in their attempts to counteract the impact of such taxes. Policymakers should therefore c...

There is a large literature documenting that high host-country corporate taxes deter foreign direct investment. However, some recent papers have questioned the robustness of this result in developing countries. In this paper we investigate one possible reason: the presence of a trade-off between taxes and good governance. We find that taxes and governance interact and that taxes and corruption ...

The traditional theory of fiscal federalism prescribes a very limited tax base for subnational governments. The only "good" local taxes are said to be those (1) that are easy to administer locally, (2) that are imposed solely (or mainly) on local residents, and (3) that do not raise problems of "harmonization" or "competition" between subnational governments or between subnational and national ...

Although countries experiences on environmental taxation differ, discussions in New Zealand coincide with the recent announcement by the government of a new carbon tax and a new energy tax to be introduced before the first phase of the Kyoto protocol. This paper provides preliminary simulation results that may help answer some policy-related questions including the relative microand macrolevel ...

The French have an extensive system of food regulations that favors small, local, “traditional” producers. There is even a word for this Gallic preference for taking local geography seriously, terroir. We argue that the modern French concept of terroir, along with many of the anti-competitive regulations that emerged to support it at the beginning of the twentieth century, can be partly explain...

In 1989, 30 states levied taxes on the generation or management of hazardous waste. These taxes constitute one of the broadest applications of an emissions tax in U.S. environmental policy and provide a natural experiment for studying the effects of such taxes. This paper examines the impacts on chlorinated solvent waste from metal cleaning, using plant-level data from EPA's 1987-89 Toxic Relea...

The government for a jurisdiction has both capital and labor taxes at its disposal. It taxes mobile capital to finance the public good despite the desire to attract capital and despite the tax on immobile labor if capital incomes are distributed more unequally than labor incomes among the residents of the jurisdiction. The result extends to progressive taxes and to pure redistribution. JEL clas...