The Beginnings of the Greek-Catholic Diocese of Oradea in the Eighteenth Century. The Beiuş Estate Conscription of 1778

"The Beiuş estate conscription of 1778 holds valuable information regarding the fiscal state of the local population. The Greek-Catholic Diocese had just been created and it needed a source of income to sustain itself and at the same time to grow. This estate was one of the richest in the whole county, formed from 72 villages with Beiuş at its center. From buildings such as mills, inns and taverns, to farms and homes, they are all presented inside the document. Moise Dragoşi, the first Greek-catholic bishop of Oradea struggled to get this estate and it took four years. The conscription in this case represents not just an official piece of paper, but a window into the life of an eighteenth-century peasant. Keywords: conscription, Beiuş, estate, Greek-catholic, Oradea, income, tax. "

The Russian Empire (1453–1917)

The construction of a mighty empire and impressive high culture in a region uniquely far from the centers of global trade and culture was a great achievement. Elements of Eurasian empire and European military-fiscal state merged in the tsarist polity. This polity’s success rested on a powerful “sacred” monarchy that dominated the church and forged a close alliance with the landowning nobility while preserving a massive “state peasantry” whose surplus went to the crown alone. As with the English, French, and Spanish, Russia’s peripheral location in Europe facilitated the conquest of non-European territories. The Industrial and French revolutions posed great challenges to Russia’s geopolitical security and social order, as well as to the regime’s legitimacy. Though these challenges (e.g., nationalism) were faced by most empires, in the Russian case factors that had been essential to previous success (autocracy, serfdom, Westernized elites) contributed to undermining the regime’s legitimacy by 1900.

Beyond death and taxes: Fiscal studies and the fiscal state

The past decade has seen a resurgence of interdisciplinary interest in fiscal studies, from the new fiscal sociology to fiscal geographies and beyond, with roots in the 20th century theories of Schumpeter (liberal) and O’Connor (Marxian). The notion of a ‘tax state’ remains particularly germane, and indeed fiscal studies have all but narrowed to assessments of the relations and implications of taxation. This paper calls for a meaningful engagement with the ‘fiscal’ in fiscal studies where taxation is better understood as being but one component of public sector revenue and expenditure (alongside other important features like asset ownership, debt/credit, and intergovernmental transfers). More than an academic quibble over terminology or unit of analysis, narrowing ‘fiscal’ to ‘tax’ obscures many budget items and misses out on important temporal trends in the political economy of state revenue and expenditure. These issues are explored in two parts: the roots of fiscal studies (politicizing theoretical underpinnings), and the various conjunctural features of the fiscal state (tracing the temporal through Canadian examples).

Fiscal Capacity and State Fragility

This chapter discusses issues that arise in building an effective fiscal state and relates this to debates about causes and consequences of state fragility. It argues that the lack of capacity to raise revenue is symptomatic of a wider range of issues that lie at the heart of state fragility, including a weak private sector, a lack of legitimacy and poorly functioning administrative structures. Building the capacity to mobilize revenues requires building a social contract based on a culture of voluntary compliance in addition to strengthening more tangible aspects of the state. This has far-reaching consequences policies that aim to strengthen fiscal capacity in the context of fragility.

The Fiscal State-Dependent Effects of Capital Income Tax Cuts

Using the post-WWII data of U.S. federal corporate income tax changes, within a Smooth Transition VAR, this paper finds that the output effect of capital income tax cuts is government debt-dependent: it is less expansionary when debt is high than when it is low. To explore the mechanisms that can drive this fiscal state-dependent tax effect, the paper uses a DSGE model with regime-switching fiscal policy and finds that a capital income tax cut is stimulative to the extent that it is unlikely to result in a future fiscal adjustment. As government debt increases to a sufficiently high level, the probability of future fiscal adjustments starts rising, and the expansionary effects of a capital income tax cut can diminish substantially, whether the expected adjustments are through a policy reversal or a consumption tax increase. Also, a capital income tax cut need not always have large revenue feedback effects as suggested in the literature.