This timely reference analyzes the rationale, impact, and feasibility of taxation of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) as a public health measure to contribute curbing obesity and diabetes rates, specifically in Canada. It presents the pros and cons of taxing soda, with the latest data on adverse health effects of its consumption, plus the various business and political issues surrounding the contentious proposition. Reviewed research is multidisciplinary, spanning health and medicine to ethics, economics, and law. Conclusions and caveats are clear and presented at a comfort level for the general reader. The result is a blueprint for analyzing the relevancy of taxes on sweetened soft drinks or other low-nutrition food products, plus a trove of valuable insights into aspects of government decision-making and consumer food behavior. Included in the coverage: * Reasons for specifically targeting SSBs * SSB taxation as a public health policy instrument * Effects of SSB taxation on energy intakes and population health * Potential undesirable effects relating to SSB taxation * Social and political acceptability of SSB taxation * Evaluability of SSB taxation Taxing Soda for Public Health will interest policymakers, public health professionals, advocacy groups, and researchers at the Canadian and international levels (e.g., in areas such as public health, nutrition, food and health policies, health economics, and evaluation), as well as students and all other parties interested in nutrition policies.

This convenient reference tool is designed for real estate investors who wish to maximize their tax benefits through a better understanding of real estate law. Ferguson and Spede thoroughly analyze and explain real estate tax laws, as well as the problems and advantages of purchasing, owning, and selling real estate. Specifically explained and illustrated are such issues as calculating excess investment and interest, installment selling, alternative minimum tax, investment credits, recapture of tax credits, trading properties, leases with options to buy, and the establishment of new bases for trade. In addition, the authors emphasize many of the tax traps and pitfalls encountered by investors, including accelerated depreciation, amortization of expenses, and tax write-offs. Also considered are related topics such as personal property taxes, special tax problems, the rehabilitation of historic and older commercial properties, low income housing, rental cooperatives, condominium units, and home ownership taxation. Finally, there is a discussion of tax reform, including the changes brought about by the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, as well as the possible effects of the flat tax rate proposed by the Treasury Department in January of 1985. The volume is completely cross-referenced, and includes chapter summaries, case histories, and a glossary, as well as numerous tables and illustrations.

Preface This book contains the proceedings of the International Tax Conference on the c- th th mon consolidated corporate tax base (CCCTB) that was held in Berlin on 15 - 16 may 2007. The conference was jointly organised by the German Federal Ministry of Finance, the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim, and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law, Munich. More than 250 participants from all over Europe and other regions, scholars, politicians, business people and tax administrators, discussed the Eu- pean Commission's proposal to establish a CCCTB. Three panels of tax experts evaluated the common tax base with respect to structural elements, consolidation, allocation, international aspects and administration. The conference made clear that the CCCTB has the potential to overcome some of the most intriguing problems of corporate income taxation within the Common Market. Common tax accounting rules substantially reduce compliance and administrative costs. Consolidation of a group's profits and losses effects cro- border loss compensation which removes a major tax obstacle for European cro- border investment. At the same time, tax planning with respect to financing and transfer pricing is pushed back within the European Union. Moreover, as far as the CCCTB applies, member states are able to remove tax provisions that are targeted at cross border tax evasion and that might be challenged by the jurisdiction of the Eu- pean Court of Justice.

Should the rich bear the brunt of the tax burden, or should it be shared proportionately among the population? This issue has dominated recent public debates over the tax system, and is a controversial issue among economists. This book contains nine essays by economists on tax progressivity--how the tax burden is borne across income classes--and how the tax system affects the inequality of income. It presents the basic facts about how tax progressivity in the U.S. has changed in the 1980s, and assesses its role in exacerbating or offsetting the overall trend toward increased income inequality.

This theoretically rooted and research-based book provides insights on the JESSICA funding model which - unlike the traditional non-repayable aid - focuses on supporting sustainable urban development projects in a repayable and recyclable way. Looking through the lens of the JESSICA financial engineering mechanism used in urban transformation, it examines the functioning and performance thereof and formulates policy recommendations for the future. The aim of this volume is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the JESSICA sustainable funding model by exploring its repayable assistance mechanism to support sustainable urban development projects. The authors make several noteworthy contributions to the literature on EU cohesion policy and shed light on the use of the repayable instruments within public interventions, while providing, for the first time, a critical analysis of the JESSICA sustainable funding model from the holistic perspective which is especially relevant for supporting sustainable urban development. Financial Engineering in Sustainable Funding of Urban Development in the EU provides policy-significant findings that are important for EU cohesion policy in the field of repayable assistance to be reinvested in the long term in urban and regional transformation.

A rapidly growing area of economic research investigates the top of the income distribution using data from income tax records. In Top Incomes: A Global Perspective New York Times best-selling author Thomas Piketty and noted member of the Conseil d'Analyse Economique, A. B. Atkinson brings together studies of top incomes for twelve countries from around the world, including China, India, Japan, Argentina and Indonesia. Together with the first volume, published in 2007, the studies cover twenty two countries. They have a long time span, the earliest data relating to 1875 (for Norway), allowing recent developments to be placed in historical perspective. The volume describes in detail the source data and the methods employed. It will be an invaluable reference source for researchers in the field. Individual country chapters deal with the specific nature of the data for each of the countries, and describe the long-term evolution of top income shares.
In the countries as a whole, dramatic changes have taken place at the top of the income distribution. Over the first part of the century, top income shares fell markedly. This largely took the form of a reduction in capital incomes. The different authors examine the impact of the First and Second World Wars, contrasting countries that were and were not engaged. They consider the impact of depressions and banking crises, and pay particular attention to the impact of progressive taxation.
In the last 30 years, the shares of top incomes have increased markedly in the US and other Anglo-Saxon countries, reflecting the increased dispersion of earnings. The volume includes statistics on the much-discussed top pay and bonuses, providing a global perspective that discusses important differences between countries such as the lesser increase in Continental Europe. This book, together with volume 1, documents this interesting development and explores the underlying causes. The findings are brought together in a final summary chapter by Atkinson, Piketty and Saez.

This book offers a wholesale reinterpretation of both the introduction of excise taxation in Great Britain in the 1640s and the genesis of the Financial Revolution of the 1690s. By analysing hitherto unpublished manuscript and print sources, D'Maris Coffman resolves divergent accounts of these constitutionally problematic but fiscally significant new taxes. Parliament's success at imposing on a deeply divided kingdom an extra-legal species of indirect taxation, which hitherto had been a constitutional anathema and a political impossibility, remains one of the most striking features of the period. A fresh reading of William Petty's Treatise on Taxes illustrates the development of an indigenous discourse in defence of the tax state. By highlighting the importance of fiscal innovation during the Civil Wars and Interregnum for the development of the fiscal state in Britain, this study challenges 'stylised facts' about the economic significance of 1688/89. The final chapter delivers new insight into why the eighteenth-century British public accepted both unprecedented levels of government borrowing and one of the heaviest tax burdens in Western Europe. Coffman reveals how a 'new financial history, ' rooted in closely contextualised studies, can contribute to current debates about sustainable levels of taxation and to fundamental questions of economic theory.

An inherently interdisciplinary subject, tax avoidance has attracted growing interest of scholars in many fields. No longer limited to law and accounting, research increasingly has been conducted from other perspectives, such as anthropology, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and economic psychology. This was -recently stimulated by politicians, mass media, and the public focussing on tax avoidance after the global financial and economic crisis put a squeeze on private and public finances. New challenges were posed by changing definitions and controversies in the interpretation of tax avoidance concept, as well as a host of new rules and policies that need to be fully understood. This collection provides a comprehensive guide to students and academics on the subjects of tax avoidance from an interdisciplinary perspective, exploring the areas of accounting, law, economics, psychology, and sociology. It covers global as well as regional issues, presents a discussion of the definition, legality, morality, and psychology of tax avoidance, and provides guidance on measurement of economic effect of tax avoidance activities. With a truly international selection of authors from the UK, North America, Africa, Asia, Australasia, Middle East, and continental Europe, with well-known experts and rising stars of the field, the contributors cover the entire terrain of this important topic. The Routledge Companion to Tax Avoidance Research is a ground-breaking attempt to bring together scholarly research in tax avoidance, offering rigorous academic analysis of an important and hotly debated issue in a structured and balanced way.

This book focuses on corporate sector development in the context of transition economies, such as China. In doing so, the book uses quantitative methods to test several hypotheses that are salient to the Chinese economic situation. Topics covered in the book include the relationship between tax management and firm performance, the extent to which a short-term focus on tax management can lead to long-term vulnerabilities, the impact of government ownership on tax management impact, and the link between the co-evolution of marketization and corruption, and institutional change and tax management. With that the book offers rich empirical evidence to examine tax management, firm performance and corruption in a broad context, while permitting comparison between the Chinese experience and the market economies.

First published in 1987. The reform of the welfare state in the United Kingdom is high on the agenda of all political parties and the proposals for reform, both official and private, are numerous. In this book, Professor Beenstock and his colleagues took a comprehensive account of the social security of the 1980s, as well as the tax system, as it had evolved over the Beveridge era and how it affected our incentive to work. The book describes the theory of labour supply decisions in their relationship to the tax benefit system. It illustrates how tax and social security arrangements affected labour supply decisions as well as monitoring how these decisions had evolved over the post-war period. It also considers retirement decisions in the UK as well as the government's plans to reform the social security system.

First published in 1981. This book reports on a decade of research into the effects of taxation on the supply of labour. In addition to their work in making labour supply estimates, the study explores a number of the ways labour supply estimates can be used. When budget constraints are non-linear it is not possible to estimate the effects of (tax) or other policy changes from knowledge of labour supply elasticities alone, and it is necessary to re-estimate the original model used to derive the estimates. The implications of labour supply estimates for the study of inequality and optimal taxation are considered. Macro-economic models of the economy typically omit labour supply functions or include functions which are inconsistent with micro-economic work on labour supply. This book will appeal to academic economists, senior students and policy-makers in the field of public finance and labour economics, who will find much of interest from both the theoretical and policy standpoints.

This concise book on the development of the U.S. tax system traces taxation from the Ancient Egyptians through the Chinese, Indian, Ancient Greeks, Romans, Incas, Britons, United Kingdom, and the U.S. A quick overview of laws and the reasons behind their enactment is included.

This work aims to explore the main distortions arising from the economic double taxation of distributed profits in three member states of the European Union: Portugal, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. It presents a comparative analysis of the tax implications of this form of double taxation from a legal point of view. To this end, both domestic laws and international tax treaties are analyzed, inward and outward investment is covered and dividend income tax burdens are ascertained having regard to those taxes that directly influence the effective dividend income tax rate. The results of this analysis are assessed in light of the tax principles of neutrality, efficiency, nondiscrimination under EU law and the objectives of fair distribution of revenue between member states, simplicity and prevention of tax evasion. The author concludes that well-accepted tax principles, such as the principles of worldwide taxation and vertical equity, operate less efficiently within the overall tax system. Instead, the source principle is gaining momentum, with simplicity and neutrality aims prevailing over distributional criteria. From a theoretical point of view, therefore, the principle of capital import neutrality is of growing importance as compared with the principle of capital export neutrality. Furthermore, it is suggested that problems remain with regard to the balence between debt financing and equity financing, unless an exemption system is in place, further complicated by the more favourable treatment given to capital gains. Neither classical nor imputation systems, the author concludes, provide a satisfactory answer to these problems.

The only single-source guide to understanding, using, adapting, and designing state-of-the-art agent-based modelling of tax evasion A computational method for simulating the behavior of individuals or groups and their effects on an entire system, agent-based modeling has proven itself to be a powerful new tool for detecting tax fraud. While interdisciplinary groups and individuals working in the tax domain have published numerous articles in diverse peer-reviewed journals and have presented their findings at international conferences, until Agent-based Modelling of Tax Evasion there was no authoritative, single-source guide to state-of-the-art agent-based tax evasion modeling techniques and technologies. Featuring contributions from distinguished experts in the field from around the globe, Agent-Based Modelling of Tax Evasion provides in-depth coverage of an array of field tested agent-based tax evasion models. Models are presented in a unified format so as to enable readers to systematically work their way through the various modeling alternatives available to them. Three main components of each agent-based model are explored in accordance with the Overview, Design Concepts, and Details (ODD) protocol, each section of which contains several sub elements that help to illustrate the model clearly and that assist readers in replicating the modeling results described. * Presents models in a unified and structured manner to provide a point of reference for readers interested in agent-based modelling of tax evasion * Explores the theoretical aspects and diversity of agent-based modeling through the example of tax evasion * Provides an overview of the characteristics of more than thirty agent-based tax evasion frameworks * Functions as a solid foundation for lectures and seminars on agent-based modelling of tax evasion The only comprehensive treatment of agent-based tax evasion models and their applications, this book is an indispensable working resource for practitioners and tax evasion modelers both in the agent-based computational domain and using other methodologies. It is also an excellent pedagogical resource for teaching tax evasion modeling and/or agent-based modeling generally.

Any decision by a company regarding the use of profits to pay tax, remuneration or shareholder returns has ethical implications. Sharing Profits reviews high-profile ethical issues facing companies in how profits are used, and proposes a framework for understanding the ethical implications of decisions.

Based on a pioneering research programme on the evolution of top incomes, this volume brings together studies from 10 OECD countries. This rapidly growing field of economic research investigates the top segment of the income distribution by using data from income tax records over the past century. As well as describing the source data and methods employed, the authors also discuss the dramatic changes that have occurred at the top of the income scale throughout the 20th century.
This fascinating study is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive historic overview of top income distribution over the last century. It looks at why top incomes shares fell markedly in the first half of the 20th century and why, more recently, there has been a striking difference in the top income distribution between continental Europe and English-speaking OECD countries, like the UK, USA, and Australia. Written by Thomas Piketty, New York Times best-selling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and noted member of the Conseil d'Analyse Economique, A. B. Atkinson, this seminal work provides rich pickings for those with an interest in inequality, development, the economic impact of war, taxation, economic history, and executive compensation.

The UK and the USA have historically represented opposite ends of the spectrum in their approaches to taxing corporate income. Under the British approach, corporate and shareholder income taxes have been integrated under an imputation system, with tax paid at the corporate level imputed to shareholders through a full or partial credit against dividends received. Under the American approach, by contrast, corporate and shareholder income taxes have remained separate under what is called a 'classical' system in which shareholders receive little or no relief from a second layer of taxes on dividends. Steven A. Bank explores the evolution of the corporate income tax systems in each country during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to understand the common legal, economic, political and cultural forces that produced such divergent approaches and explains why convergence may be likely in the future as each country grapples with corporate taxation in an era of globalization.

Tax by Design identifies what makes a good tax system for an open developed economy in the 21st century and suggests how the UK tax system could be reformed to move in that direction. The recommendations stress the importance of neutrality and transparency in tax design. It draws on the expert evidence from the commissioned chapters and commentaries in Dimensions of Tax Design. It also acknowledges the growing importance of globalised markets and multinational corporations as well as the challenges created by changing population demographics, the growth of new technologies, and the broadened objectives of policy makers.
The Commission's work was directed by:
Timothy Besley
Richard Blundell
Malcolm Gammie
James Poterba
The Commission's editorial team:
Stuart Adam
Stephen Bond
Robert Chote
Paul Johnson
Gareth Myles

This book offers an analysis of China in its muddling through of financial reforms towards adopting a local real property tax. The research is designed to serve dual purposes. First, it is an effort to provide an independent perspective on an urgent public policy under consideration by the Chinese government and to reflect upon this policy's process, which started over a dozen years ago yet is still in the fermenting stage with no sight of fruition. Additionally, this project is intended to share China's experience with other developing and transitional countries, so they can discern the difficulties China has faced and understand what may entangle them in the modernization of their taxation systems.

This book covers a broad range of the most challenging topics in US international taxation laws before breaking into separate discussions of the issues related to both inbound and outbound taxes. Real examples and selected seminal cases are analysed at the end of each chapter to simplify even the most abstract tax provisions. Practitioners, academics, and advanced students specializing in specific areas of international finance will welcome this comprehensive overview of the US tax system's international laws.