1. Increasing Economic and Social Disparity 2. Globalization, Disparities, and Sustainability 3. Overview of Economic Policies for Narrowing Disparities 3.1. Taxation 3.2. Social Expenditure 3.3. Labor Market Policy 3.4. Monetary Policy and Macroeconomic Policy 3.5. Institutional Systems 4. Obstacles for Governments to Overcome 5. Global Efforts for Poverty Reduction: World Bank Strategic Shift...

Optimal international taxation and its implications for convergence in long run income growth rates are analyzed in the context of an endogenously growing world economy with perfect capital mobility. Under tax competition (i) the residence principle will maximize national welfare; (ii) the optimal long run tax rate on capital incomes from various sources will be zero in all countries; and (iii)...

Bigger governments raise the possibilities for corruption; more corruption may in turn raise the support for redistributive policies that intend to correct the inequality and injustice generated by corruption. We formalize these insights in a simple dynamic model. A positive feedback from past to current levels of taxation and corruption arises either when wealth originating in corruption and r...

This quotation appears at the beginning of the Policy Recommendations section of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's recent jobs study (OECD, 1994). However, of the fifty-nine separate recommendations only three concern macroeconomic policies, and but 10 percent of the background analysis is concerned with macroeconomic issues. The three specific macroeconomic recommenda...

We built a model of regulation for non point source water pollution through non linear taxation/subsidisation of agricultural production. Farms are heterogeneous along two dimensions: their ability to transform inputs into final production, and the available area they possess. We propose a framework for describing the ability of farmers, the cost and the emission joint functions from a populati...

The past academic literature on tax policy has focused almost entirely on the analysis of tax structures in the richest countries, particularly the U.S. Overall the optimal tax models explain reasonably well the observed tax policies in these countries. As summarized in Gordon (2000), for example, past theoretical work suggests that taxes on consumption or labor income should dominate use of ca...

This paper examines optimal factor taxation when output is produced from labour and capital and some (or all) households save capital. It is shown that there is a reputational equilibrium in which the government has no incentive to change its announced tax policies. In this equilibrium, the Judd-Chamley assertion that the tax on capital income tends to zero in the limit holds. This is independe...

This paper considers tax policies to deal with Sudden Stops – declines in aggregate activity that are magnified by a binding collateral constraint – that occasionally occur in emerging market economies. Households and/or the government are assumed to face model uncertainty and desire robustness against alternative models. Welfare gains from optimal taxation are small if the government trusts it...

It is often argued that multinationals are reluctant to transfer technology due to the fear of spillovers. We show that this need not be the case if host country policies like taxation are taken into account. Furthermore, we examine the incentives the multinational and the host country have to engage in an international joint venture. We show why a multinational may agree to enter a joint ventu...

E-commerce is growing rapidly in Brazil, led by informationintensive and transaction-intensive sectors such as finance, manufacturing, and retail/wholesale. However, Brazil’s highly uneven income distribution is a major barrier for B2C diffusion. Government policies have emphasized promotional or enabling initiatives such as e-procurement, tax filings, and providing Internet access to social in...