"Why do some countries "learn to tax" and others do not? And, why does tax reform consolidate in some countries and not in others? The importance of these queries for the developing world and for Latin America cannot be exaggerated. This book tracks the evolution of tax policy in Chile and Argentina in order to shed light on these questions, providing a unique window into the nature of tax policymaking in Latin America. In the process, broader insights are gained into the larger question about why Chile has become the "tiger" economy of the region while Argentina has been such a persistent economic underachiever"--

The Nordic tax systems have recently undergone dramatic changes. Tax bases have been broadened, marginal tax rates have been cut, and the Nordic countries have abandoned the traditional income tax in favour of a 'dual' income tax combining progressive taxation of labour income with a low flat tax rate on capital income. Nordic governments have also experimented with new innovative methods of taxing business income. This book evaluates the Nordic tax reforms in the light of recent advances in the theory of taxation.

Situating Gorbachev and perestroika historically and ideologically, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of Soviet political economy in the context of socialist theory and seven decades of its application in the Soviet Union. A. F. Dowlah challenges the belief that socialism is sternly committed to centralized economic and political structures, and claims that socialism contains several theories, some more decentralized or democratic, others more authoritarian. Although the contemporary crisis in the socialist economies powerfully challenges the foundations of socialist theory and practice, Gorbachev, up until the coup attempt of August 1991, claimed that perestoika embodied more socialism, not less, and he was looking within the socialist tradition to solve contemporary Soviet problems. This work examines Gorbachev's claim and evaluates perestroika as a strategy of transition to a new variant of socialism. Based on thorough inquiry, textual evidence, and historical facts, the study concludes that Gorbachev's claims are substantially legitimate, and that a democratic version of socialism is possible within the Russian socialist tradition. It remains to be seen, however, in light of recent political and economic developments, whether this, or some more radical set of reforms, will emerge in Gorbachev's troubled economy.

No government can be sustained without the ability to tax its citizens. The question then arises how can a nation do so in a way that's fair and equitable to taxpayers without distorting incentives or the allocation of resources, while simultaneously promoting economic growth and providing the state with the funds it requires to adequately address the needs of its citizens? This insightful work, featuring contributions from a stellar array of international tax experts and economists, addresses the crucial issues which developed countries will confront in the early decades of the twenty-first century: - The pursuit of tax reform. - Personal tax base: income or consumption? - Tax rate scale: equity and efficiency aspects. - Business tax reform: structural and design issues. - Interjurisdictional issues. - Controlling tax avoidance.

This book aims to explore if and how securitization changed financial intermediation and lending behaviour by reviewing the pre- and post-financial crisis theoretical and empirical literature. The book's distinctive feature is bringing the growing post-crisis empirical evidence to the attention of a wider audience by critically appraising it against pre-crisis arguments. With its thought-provoking insights, this book is of particular interest for students, practitioners and academics.

Alberto Heimler and Daniele Meulders In the last decade the modelling of the interrelationship between public finance and the rest of the economy has seen substantial advances, reflected in many of the papers delivered to the Applied Econometrics Association Conference held at Confindustria, Rome, on 30 November and 1 December 1989. In particular, the development of the literature on applied general-equilibrium modelling has found most of its applications in the field of taxation, enlarging and completing the estimation of the welfare loss due to distortionary taxes. In this context an important extension has been the introduction of overlapping-generation models. Furthermore, it has become clear that most individual decisions, especially the decision whether or not to work, are dependent upon the tax system, in the sense that the higher the marginal income tax the larger the wedge between labour cost and take-home pay, the last one being the decision variable in the demand for leisure. Finally, in the European context, the completion of the internal market has brought about the necessity to harmonize fiscal systems in the EEC member countries. A number of papers study, therefore, the effects of fiscal reform on efficiency, welfare and growth.

Fiscal Policy and Interest Rates in the European Union is a comprehensive study concerned with the potential effects of fiscal policy on financial markets in the European Union. It takes into account the gradual liberalization of capital movements throughout Western Europe and the institutional framework of the European monetary system. Klaas Knot takes a fresh approach to the impact of budget deficits on interest rates, especially in relation to international financial integration, and concludes that the increases in European budget deficits since the early 1970s have raised interest rates in the long term throughout the Union. In conclusion he argues that balanced budget deficits are necessary to maintain low interest rates. This important new book will be of interest to students, academics and policymakers concerned with monetary and public economics.

An inside view of the forces which shaped SEPA and the PSD written from the unique perspective of someone closely involved throughout the process. It uncovers the strategic, legal and practical implications of the full harmonization agenda and provides an assessment of where these initiatives stand today, including key lessons learned.

Provides descriptions, instructions, and exercises to help readers master government budgeting as it is actually practiced.

This volume presents the results of research which represent a significant contribution to the knowledge of equity in the finance and delivery of health care in ten countries. It compares the experience of nine European countries and the US using a consistent methodology to draw out comparable results from ten very different health care systems. Such an approach facilitates not only a greater understanding of the performance of the health care systems of other countries but also the identification of the lessons that can be learnt from international comparisons. In recent years it has been recognized that many health and health care problems are similar across many countries and their solution can be usefuly informed by the abandonment both of isolation and the belief that an individual country's problems are unique. The contents of this book demonstrate that given efficient research teams, research funding can produce both significant new knowledge of direct relevance to the reform of health care systems world-wide, and also collaborative, mutually informative work between Europeans and others living outside the EEC.

The Handbook of Public Finance provides a definitive source, reference, and text for the field of public finance. In 18 chapters it surveys the state of the art - the tradition and breadth of the field but also its current status and recent developments. The Handbook's intellectual foundation and orientation is truly multidisciplinary. Throughout its examination of the standard material of public finance, it explores the connections between that material and such neighboring fields as political science, sociology, law, and public administration.

The editors and contributors to the Handbook are distinguished scholars who write clearly and accessibly about the political economy of government budgets and their policy implications. To address the needs and interests of international scholars, they place European issues next to the American agenda and give attention to the issues of transformation in Central Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

General Editors: JA1/4rgen G. Backhaus, University of Erfurt
Richard E. Wagner, George Mason University
Contributors: Andy H. Barnett, Charles B. Blankart, Thomas E. Borcherding, Rainald Borck, Geoffrey Brennan, Giuseppe Eusepi, J. Stephen Ferris, Fred E. Folvary, Andrea Garzoni, Heinz Grossekettaler, Walter Hettich, Scott Hinds, Randall G. Holcombe, Jean-Michel Josselin, Carla Marchese, Alain Marciano, William S. Peirce, Nicholas Sanchez, David Schap, A. Allan Schmid, Russell S. Sobel, Stanley L. Winer, Bruce Yandle.

This book on the different aspects of international economic policy covers financial crises, reserve accumulation, capital flows and currency wars as well as issues relating to foreign direct investment and developments in China and India.

Reflecting on the breadth of its scope, Aspects of Globalisation is intended to serve a varied audience. Being at the forefront of research, it should appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in new approaches and ideas for future research. To this end, the editors have encouraged the contributors to pursue varied themes and raise new issues, approach their subject matter in an analytically rigorous way, and to include fairly extended review sections within their papers, so as to make them useful to a wider readership. Furthermore, diverse methodologies are followed, including the widespread use of state-of-the-art econometrics, reflecting the recent trend in economic analysis. Equally importantly, many of the papers offer clear-cut policy conclusions and should therefore be of direct relevance to policy-minded analysts and policy-makers.

We thus hope that the papers included here will provoke further research and ideas as well as contribute to ongoing policy debates. Its diversity, rigour and scope should be positive attributes of the volume and should make it a useful source of information for researchers and policy-makers alike.

This book provides a comprehensive, step-by-step plan that simplifies the myriad complexities surrounding the formation and incorporation of branch offices and subsidiary companies within such havens as the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Greece, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Panama, Puerto Rico and Switzerland. In addition, it presents detailed information on each tax haven's economic, legal, political, cultural and geographical aspects, which must be considered if such an enterprise is to operate successfully.;In this compact and informative volume, Adam Starchild reveals the secrets of tax haven business planning for the corporate executive. He details the theory and practice of haven dealings and the incorporation of holding and operating companies. He spells out the advantages and disadvantages of the multitude of haven uses that are available to all companies having any international facets to their business - whether it be manufacturing, importing components, exporting, or services.

Using a comparative framework, this volume presents case studies of issues of public procurement and discusses how procurement professionals and policy makers in different regions are responding to these challenges. This book discusses current issues in public procurement. Over the past few decades, public procurement has had to evolve conceptually and organizationally in the face of unrelenting budget constraints, government downsizing, public demand for increased transparency in public procurement, as well as greater concerns about efficiency, fairness and equity. Procurement professionals have also had to deal with a changeable climate produced by emerging technology, environmental concerns, and ongoing tension between complex regional trade agreements and national socioeconomic goals. The first section discusses innovation and reforms in public procurement and how practitioners are adapting to and making use of new technologies. The second section addresses the challenges of maintaining transparency, equity, and fairness in public procurement. The final section discusses preferential public procurement and introduces strategies for building sustainable public procurement systems. By combining theory and analysis with evidence from the real world, this book is of equal use to academics, policy makers, and procurement professionals.

Denmark and Switzerland are small and successful countries with exceptionally content populations. However, they have very different political institutions and economic models. They have followed the general tendency in the West toward economic convergence, but both countries have managed to stay on top. They both have a strong liberal tradition, but otherwise their economic strategies are a welfare state model for Denmark and a safe haven model for Switzerland. The Danish welfare state is tax-based, while the expenditures for social welfare are insurance-based in Switzerland. The political institutions are a multiparty unicameral system in Denmark, and a permanent coalition system with many referenda and strong local government in Switzerland. Both approaches have managed to ensure smoothly working political power-sharing and economic systems that allocate resources in a fairly efficient way. To date, they have also managed to adapt the economies to changes in the external environment with a combination of stability and flexibility.

The book provides an overview of the governmental accounting status quo in Europe by analysing the public sector accounting, budgeting and auditing systems in fourteen European countries. IT sheds light on the challenges faced by European countries as they move towards adoption of the European Public Sector Accounting Standards (EPSAS).

The 39th annual edition of the leading guide to taxation in Britain. This practical and user-friendly guide is a bestseller with students, professionals, accountants and private individuals, explaining in simple terms how the UK tax system works and how best to minimise tax liabilities.

Public spending on infrastructure plays an important role in promoting economic growth and poverty alleviation. Empirical studies unequivocally show that under-investment in infrastructure limit economic growth. At the same time, numerous other studies have shown that investment in infrastructure can be a highly effective tool in fighting poverty reduction1. In that context, the financing of infrastructure has been a critical element of most economic growth and poverty reduction strategies in developing countries, since the start of this millennium. This bookprovides a comparative analysis of the aggregate and sectoral implications of higher spending on infrastructure in three very different Asian countries: China, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Particular attention is paid to the role of alternative financing mechanisms for increasing public infrastructure investment, namely distortionary and non-distortionary means of financing. The book will be of interest to scholars and policy-makers concerned with economic growth in developing countries."

This book is an introduction to the history of - and current measurement practice of - inflation for the United Kingdom. The authors describe the historical development of inflation measures in a global context, and do so without using formal mathematical language and related jargon that relates only to a few specialist scholars. Although inflation is a widely used and quoted statistic, and despite the important role inflation plays in real people's lives - through pension uprating, train tickets, interest rates and the work of economists - few people understand how it is created. O'Neill, Ralph and Smith mix historical data with a description of practices inside the UK statistical system and abroad, which will aid understanding of how this important economic statistic is produced, and the important and controversial choices that statisticians have made over time.

This book provides a self-contained presentation of the statistical tools required for evaluating public programs, as advocated by many governments, the World Bank, the European Union, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. After introducing the methodological framework of program evaluation, the first chapters are devoted to the collection, elementary description and multivariate analysis of data as well as the estimation of welfare changes. The book then successively presents the tools of ex-ante methods (financial analysis, budget planning, cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness and multi-criteria evaluation) and ex-post methods (benchmarking, experimental and quasi-experimental evaluation). The step-by-step approach and the systematic use of numerical illustrations equip readers to handle the statistics of program evaluation. It not only offers practitioners from public administrations, consultancy firms and nongovernmental organizations the basic tools and advanced techniques used in program assessment, it is also suitable for executive management training, upper undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as for self-study.