redistributive taxation
Recently Published Documents


TOTAL DOCUMENTS

123
(FIVE YEARS 18)

H-INDEX

18
(FIVE YEARS 0)

Author(s):  
Eren Gürer

AbstractThis study explores the implications of rising markups for optimal Mirrleesian income and profit taxation. Using a stylized model with two individuals, the main forces shaping welfare-optimal policies are analytically characterized. Although a higher profit tax has redistributive benefits, it adversely affects market competition, leading to a greater equilibrium cost-of-living. Rising markups directly contribute to a decline in optimal marginal taxes on labor income. The optimal policy response to higher markups includes increasingly relying on the profit tax to fund redistribution. Declining optimal marginal income taxes assists the redistributive function of the profit tax by contributing to the expansion of the profit tax base. This response alone considerably increases the equilibrium cost-of-living. Nevertheless, a majority of the individuals become better off with the optimal policy. If it is not possible to tax profits optimally, due, for example, to profit shifting, increasing redistribution via income taxes is not optimal; every individual is worse off relative to the scenario with optimal profit taxation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-472
Author(s):  
Paolo Bozzi

Abstract This contribution analyses the change in the conception of taxation which occurred in Italy during the aftermath of World War II. From being a neutral mechanism to collect state revenue, in this period taxation became seen as a powerful political tool to redistribute income and wealth. The article primarily relies on material collected by the Economic Commission of the Ministry for the Constituent Assembly set up in 1945, a unique source which offers a comprehensive overview of the different conceptions of taxation at the time. Drawing upon their different economic and political ideologies, liberal economists and entrepreneurs, Christian Democrats, and Communists formulated alternative tax programmes. While liberal economists and entrepreneurs advocated the maintenance of the existing tax system on technical grounds, the Christian Democrats imposed a new conception of taxation as a means for income redistribution. Progressive and redistributive taxation was also present in the Communist programme, but their ambiguous tax views suffered from the lack of administrative and economic experience which liberal and Catholic economists had instead gathered before and partially even during the Fascist regime. The debate ended abruptly in 1947 with the exclusion of the left from government and the success of liberal conceptions. Nonetheless, during the 1960s, the Catholic emphasis on progressive and redistributive taxation incorporated the new Keynesian ideas on public finance and achieved a hegemonic position in the public debate, thus overcoming the traditional liberal view.


Author(s):  
Michael J. Donnelly

What drives support for or opposition to redistributive taxation and spending? Why is ethnic diversity associated with inequality and a lack of redistribution? This book argues that many individuals, recognizing that they live in a world of uncertainty, use the groups of which they are a member as a heuristic to understand how welfare states are likely to impact them. This leads to reduced support for redistribution among the wealthy, whose disproportionate influence over policy in turn leads to less redistribution. I develop the argument with a series of empirical implications, which I then test using data from a variety of sources. I examine regional and ethnic politics in the United Kingdom, Germany, Slovakia, Canada, and Italy, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence, existing and new surveys, and observational and experimental methods. The evidence is largely consistent with a heuristic theory, allowing us to see group politics in a new light.


Author(s):  
Alessandro Balestrino ◽  
Lisa Grazzini ◽  
Annalisa Luporini

AbstractWe consider an economy with two categories of agents: entrepreneurs and workers. In laissez-faire, the former gain from having their children educated, while the latter, although they may profit from their own education, have no interest in sending their children to school. We first characterise the preferred education policy-cum-redistributive taxation for the two groups, and find that entrepreneurs favour a compulsory education policy while workers prefer a purely redistributive taxation. Each group would like the policy to be entirely financed by the other group. Then, we introduce a political process with probabilistic voting and verify that an equilibrium with both a compulsory education policy and some redistribution may exist in which the workers are constrained but the entrepreneurs, who benefit from hiring educated workers, are not. The redistribution compensates the workers for being constrained by the education policy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 203-207
Author(s):  
David Reisman ◽  
Douglas Jay

Author(s):  
PAVITHRA SURYANARAYAN ◽  
STEVEN WHITE

Conventional political economy models predict taxation will increase after franchise expansion to low-income voters. Yet, contrary to expectations, in ranked societies—where social status is a cleavage—elites can instead build cross-class coalitions to undertake a strategy of bureaucratic weakening to limit future redistributive taxation. We study a case where status hierarchies were particularly extreme: the post-Civil War American South. During Reconstruction, under federal oversight, per capita taxation was higher in counties where slavery had been more extensive before the war, as predicted by standard theoretical models. After Reconstruction ended, however, taxes fell and bureaucratic capacity was weaker where slavery had been widespread. Moreover, higher intrawhite economic inequality was associated with lower taxes and weaker capacity after Reconstruction in formerly high-slavery counties. These findings on the interaction between intrawhite economic inequality and pre-War slavery suggest that elites built cross-class coalitions against taxation where whites sought to protect their racial status.


2020 ◽  
pp. 173-209
Author(s):  
Kevin Vallier

Highly redistributive taxation and left-wing regimes like property-owning democracy and liberal socialism cannot create trust for the right reasons. They are either likely to reduce social and political trust or cannot be publicly justified, or both. For example, property-owning democracy and liberal socialism are likely to sacrifice economic growth, violating the principle of sustainable improvements, and undermining the economic bases for political trust in particular. However, liberal societies can probably increase trust for the right reasons by adopting coercion-reducing policies aimed at compressing economic inequalities, such as reducing local control over residential zoning. The market may also be restricted to protect workers from workplace coercion. This chapter addresses important work on the matter from John Rawls, Thomas Piketty, and Martin Gilens.


2020 ◽  
pp. 304-336
Author(s):  
Neil Macmaster

This chapter examines how the rural population responded to the presence of FLN forces in their midst. Internal FLN documents captured by the French in September 1957 for kasma 4311, a grouping of four douars in the eastern Chelif, reveal the sophisticated counter-state that was created at the local level. The aim of the ALN in the mountains was, as far as possible, to isolate the population from the colonial administration and to prevent informing, but to do so the guerrillas needed to offer a degree of rebel governance. The detailed kasma reports and accounts reveal how the ALN assumed key state functions, including food supply, civil registration, taxation, education, health care, social welfare, and justice. Through a progressive redistributive taxation policy, funds were transferred from the more wealthy in the towns to the famished peasantry. Peasant support for the FLN was not only moral or ideological, but was also grounded in the significant material rewards of wages, pensions, and family allowances. A key problem facing the ALN was the inability to protect the population from military repression and violence, but to a degree the guerrillas found a solution by reorganizing into small, mobile groups that were less dependent on the rural population.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 213-236
Author(s):  
George Tridimas

AbstractThe substantive view of the ancient economy argues that social considerations and especially the quest for status featured prominently in ancient Greece. Paying for liturgies, the private finance of public expenditure by wealthy individuals, offered the opportunity to acquire status by choosing the level of contributions to outperform rival providers. Effectively, liturgies were a system of finance of public provision through redistributive taxation sidestepping state administration of taxes and expenditures. Applying the insights of the economic approach to status, the paper examines status competition in ancient Athens and compares paying for liturgies with a hypothetical system of explicit income taxation of the rich. It is concluded that status seeking increased aggregate provision of public goods. The results formalise important aspects of substantivism and illustrate the value of formal economic analysis in the investigation of the ancient Greek economy.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document