At a time when there is growing concern in many countries over the funding of expanding public sectors, this important new book brings together leading specialists in public finance to re-examine the economics of public sector growth. Several chapters document changes in the size of the public sector over recent decades for major OECD and Third World economies. Subsequent chapters then explore prominent explanations including public choice perspectives, bureaucracy models, relative price effects and Wagner's Law, and assess their contribution to current knowledge. The book also provides a number of new case studies of specific government activities - education, health and social security.

This book demonstrates how the reliable measurement of growth in tax revenues, both for a tax system and for its component taxes, is important for the design of tax policy. The need for discretionary changes in tax parameters (such as tax rates, income thresholds and allowances) is conditional on the expected automatic revenue growth generated by the tax system. The properties that generate these automatic revenue changes are referred to as the built-in flexibility, or revenue responsiveness, of the tax. This concept is the central focus of the analyses in this book, which provides an invaluable review and synthesis of analytical results and demonstrates how this concept can be applied in practice to yield estimates of revenue responsiveness in various countries. John Creedy and Norman Gemmell highlight how an understanding of the principal determinants of a tax system's responsiveness, and a knowledge of the relevant magnitudes, are important for the design and reform of tax policy where both revenue and redistributional considerations are typically central to the policy agenda.Providing extensions of analysis to cover indirect taxes, and direct and indirect taxes combined, as well as empirical applications for several countries, Modelling Tax Revenue Growth will be warmly welcomed by researchers and graduate students interested in public finance and government officials and those in international organisations interested in tax revenue growth.

Modelling Corporation Tax Revenue examines the revenue growth properties of corporate income taxes and how firms respond to changes in corporation tax. It provides a companion volume to the authors' Modelling Tax Revenue Growth, which explores the revenue growth and behavioural response properties of income and consumption taxes.

This is an examination of the key themes in Africa's fiscal reforms and trade liberalization, and her prospects for improving trade and development. In this work, differing reform strategies are reformed and assessed with a range of case studies of fiscal reform in Kenya, the Cote d'Ivoire and Tanzania. The impact of trade liberalization and the linking of aid and trade by donor countries are also assessed.

This book brings together research from some of the world?s leading tax economists to discuss appropriate directions for tax reform in small open economies. The eminent contributors (including Altshuler, Creedy, Freebairn, Gravelle, Heady, Kalb, Sorensen and Zodrow) investigate the beneficial directions for medium-term tax reform in the light of global developments and lessons from the latest taxation research. In addressing this issue, they review recent advances in both the theoretical and empirical tax literature and reform evidence from individual countries. Topics covered include the impact of taxes on economic performance; international and corporate taxation; personal tax and welfare systems; environmental taxation; and country-specific tax reform experiences.Bringing together leading international experts to explore specific policy reforms, this book will prove essential reading for academics and researchers of public economics, fiscal policy and tax reform. It will also be warmly welcomed both by undergraduate and graduate students of public economics or the economics of taxation, as well as policymakers and government officials working in the area of tax policy.