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Books > Business & Economics > Finance & accounting > Finance > Public finance > Taxation
Taxation is becoming more and more relevant for firms and managers
decisions, mainly due to the impacts of taxation on firms and
projects performance, profitability and value. This book provides
an introductory overview of taxation in the fields of finance and
accounting. It covers several fundamental topics of taxation, such
as income, corporate and value add tax, and tax planning and
management, international taxation, EU tax harmonization and
transfer prices. This book intends to provide the readers with an
understanding of the main concepts and principles of these topics,
regardless of specific country contexts in law. With this book,
readers will be able to understand the fundamentals of taxation at
a conceptual and practical level. By using theory and practical
examples, readers will understand taxation at a broader level,
without being concerned about country-specific issues.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1954.
In Progress and Poverty, economist Henry George scrutinizes the
connection between population growth and distribution of wealth in
the economy of the late nineteenth century. The initial portions of
the book are occupied with refuting the demographic theories of
Thomas Malthus, who asserted that the vast abundance of goods
generated by an economy's growth was spent on food. Consequently
the population rises, keeping living standards low, poverty
widespread, and starvation and disease common. Henry George had a
different attitude: that poverty could be solved and economic
progress preserved. To prove this, he draws upon decades of data
which show that the increase in land prices restrains the amount of
production on said land; business owners thus have less to pay
their workers, with the result being mass poverty especially within
cities.
Gordon Brown was a past-master at sneaking in new taxes by stealth,
but his efforts as Chancellor and then Prime Minister were merely
the latest in a long line of party leaders desperate to extract
more money from reluctant taxpayers. This book challenges the need
for government to resort to such underhand practices which
undermine the economy, killing the goose which lays the golden
eggs, and the integrity of the political process. The author argues
that not only does taxation flout the principle of private
property, but it 'is a primal cause of both inflation and
unemployment. Regardless of this, the freely elected governments of
contemporary trading economies - with the acquiescence of their
electorates - persist in raising the major part, if not all, of
their revenues by means of taxation. The immediate cause of such
action by governments...is ignorance of any acceptable alternative
method of raising sufficient public revenue.' Burgess shows how the
development of Keynes' general theory of employment 'leads to the
conclusion that an open trading economy is likely to be most
competitive, and therefore most prosperous, only when taxation is
abolished' - but government must be funded. How can this be done
without taxation? To provide an answer he refines Alfred Marshall's
distinction between the public and private value of property to
reveal an alternative, peculiarly public source of revenue. Unlike
a tax, defined by a former Labour Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, as 'a
compulsory contribution imposed by a public authority, irrespective
of the exact amount of service rendered to the taxpayer in return',
the 'public value' identified by Marshall would deliver an exact
equivalence between the benefits enjoyed and the amount paid. On
the basis of this widely accepted definition, therefore, it is not
a tax but the price for services rendered like any other
transaction - the price fixed by the market. The author shows how
reform may be introduced with a minimum of disruption, so that
politicians with an eye to re-election can achieve measurable
results during the lifetime of a parliament.
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