This book is the first to shed light on the recent opinion of taxpayers on tax and fiscal policy in Japan through an attitude questionnaire. It is said that Japanese taxpayers' tax morale is high. However, taxpayers in Japan are often described as having strong resistance to tax increases, especially consumption tax increases. There is, then, a paradox with respect to the attitude toward tax policies among Japanese citizens. This book provides background information and basic descriptive statistics from Internet surveys in Japan by the authors, who introduce their results by focusing on tax morale and opinions with respect to a consumption tax hike. The summary statistics indicate that while tax morale is high, half of the respondents oppose a consumption tax hike from 8% to 10%. Furthermore, the ideal consumption tax rate for most respondents was less than 10% in both surveys, suggesting that Japanese taxpayers have a strong tax resistance, attributable to distrust of government and politicians.

Conventional wisdom dictates that a fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical. However, contrary to this conventional views, recent research has demonstrated that fiscal policy is actually procyclical in most developing countries. In this book, we attempt to propose a new interpretation of this procyclicality after reviewing theoretical and empirical evolution of the research. In particular, by incorporating the political effort behavior of private agents into a weak government model, we explore how income fluctuations affect the optimal budget deficits in a political economy. If the government can control the political behavior, normally, the optimal budget deficit should rise in a recession as a first-best case; however, interestingly, a recession does not necessarily prompt an increase in the budget deficits in a second-best political economy. The response of the budget deficits to income fluctuations mainly depends on the efficiency of political effort, which may correspond to the degree of democracy and bureaucratic efficiency of the governments. We test the prediction of the pro-cyclical fiscal policy and find it applicable for democratic countries with semi-efficient governments including Japan.