Parliament and public spending

The Select Committee on the Treasury & Civil Service has been lobbying for improvements in the Government's presentation of public expenditure information to Parliament At last, it looks as though changes will be made. But will the House of Commons — and, in particular, the select committees — be able to seize the opportunity?     

Central-local government fiscal relations and cyclicality of public spending: evidence from China

In this study, we analyze how fiscal decentralization affects the cyclicality of government spending. We focus on China, which experienced fiscal decentralization during 1979–1993 and then partly centralized its revenue with the 1994 fiscal reform. By employing both time series and province-level panel data, we show that Chinese provincial and total government spending was strongly procyclical during the decentralization period before the reform, but both became significantly less procyclical with respect to nationwide output fluctuations after the reform. We suggest several channels through which the procyclicality of subnational government spending in decentralized fiscal federations could be restrained. We further find that less procyclical provincial government spending is associated with smaller output volatility.     

Tax competition, excludable public goods, and user charges

This paper provides an explanation for the increasing reliance on revenue from user charges on excludable public goods. We develop a model with many identical countries. The government of each country imposes a source-based tax on capital and supplies an excludable public good to heterogeneous households. Without tax competition, the price on the public good is zero. Tax competition induces each country to choose a positive price. The reliance on user charges turns out to be increasing in the intensity of tax competition measured by the number of countries. A coordinated decrease in user charges is shown to raise welfare in all countries.      

Magic,accounting and morale

This paper compares some uses made of accounting by modern societies with the use of witchcraft in less advanced ones. A common factor is a need for machinery to accommodate awkward facts in a way which does not undermine the fundamental beliefs of the culture. Western examples of this behaviour are analysed, and it is hypothesised that it occurs because low morale increases sensitivity to good and bad news. Such sensitivity affects the efficiency and existence of the organization.     

Redistribution, production inefficiency and decentralized efficiency

This paper analyzes the role of production distortion in income redistribution in an international trade model. In particular, it examines the role of the Stolper and Samuelson effect on efficient income redistribution. It first shows that production inefficiency can be part of a Pareto-efficient tax system for a small country when there is an asymmetric information problem between the government and individuals. Second, the paper shows that such production inefficiency is not only Pareto-improving for a small country, but is also essential in achieving worldwide tax-constrained Pareto-efficient allocation. These two results suggest important implications for commercial policies. The original version of this paper was circulated in 1996 as No. 391 of the Discussion Paper Series of Research Seminars in International Economics at the University of Michigan (http://www.fordschool.umich.edu/rsie/workingpapers/wp.html), with the title “Tariffs and production subsidies as devices to relax the incentive problem of a progressive income tax system”. Since the distribution of the working paper version, this paper has been cited and used in several papers, such as Guesnerie (2001) and Spector (2001). I hope that this updated version of the paper is useful for researchers.     

Institutional spending policies: implications for future asset values and spending

University endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and foundations support spending. In this paper, we analyze how different spending policies affect future asset values and spending opportunities. We show that the covariance between the asset returns and the spending rate implied by the spending policy is important in this regard. Many of the spending policies used in practice aim at smoothing the spending level by letting current spending be a function of both current asset values and earlier spending levels. One feature of these types of spending policies is that the funds can be depleted. Depleted funds cannot support spending.     

Quote inefficiency in options markets

In an arbitrage-free economy with non-zero bid-ask spreads the existence of payoffs whose price is lower than the price of a dominated payoff cannot be discarded in general. However, when the former price corresponds to trivial portfolios which involve buying or selling one unit of the basis assets, its presence, although not an arbitrage, is a severe market anomaly which we refer to as an inefficient quote. In an empirical study, we report evidence that indicates that in options markets both the frequency and the magnitude of these anomalies are substantial and we document puzzling patterns in their behavior.     

Public spending and old age

With the elderly, as with other beneficiaries of the welfare state, need seems to rise faster than available resources. A closer look at the precise nature of the need can lead to a better balance between cash payments and service provisions. And, in the end, quite modest proposals can lead to significant benefits.     

Sustainable social spending

The paper discusses a number of threats to the financial sustainability of social spending: increased internationalization of national economies, gradually higher relative costs of producing a number of human services, the “graying” of the population, slower productivity growth in the private sector, low employment rates, and various types of disincentive effects related to the welfare state itself, including moral hazard. I argue that threats from gradually rising costs of providing human services and disincentive effects of welfare-state arrangements, in particular moral hazard and benefit dependency, are more difficult to deal with than the other threats. I also discuss the choice between ad hoc policy reforms and automatic adjustment mechanisms, delegated to administrative bodies, for dealing with these threats. JEL Classification E62 · H31 · H53     

浅析纳税服务与征管效率之关系

"纳税服务"通常是指税务机关根据<税收征收管理法>及其实施细则的规定,在纳税人依法履行纳税义务时,按照纳税人对自觉、主动、及时、完整地办理各项纳税手续的合理、合法期望,为其提供规范、全面、便捷、经济的各项服务措施的总称.它具体包括:①税收信息服务.即向纳税人提供税收政策法规、纳税程序等;②纳税程序性服务.即在税收征管过程中提供的征收服务;③纳税环境服务.即为纳税人提供便利的纳税条件和场所;④纳税救济服务.即在纳税人与税务机关发生纳税争议时,为了保障纳税人的合法权益,税务机关提供的行政救济服务."纳税服务"体现的是税务机关与外界的关系.     

从查帐欠税论偷税、欠税的成因及对策

查帐欠税,是指被税务机关检查的对象在法定的期限内,未能按税务机关出具的<税务处理决定书>上列明的条款履行补交税款的义务而造成的拖欠税款的行为.<税务处理决定书>(以下称<决定书>)是税务机关在税务检查完毕后对税务违章行为或有退税的被查纳税人出具的具有法律效力的税务文书.     

Relationship between tax compliance internationally and selected determinants of tax morale

Tax compliance has been studied by analyzing the individual decision of a representative person between planning and evading taxes. A neglected aspect of tax compliance is the impact of a social contract on tax morale. Such implicit contract between the individual and the state guaranteeing a high level of economic freedom, effective competition laws, an important equity market and high moral norms, is hypothesized to have a positive impact on tax compliance. In this paper, empirical evidence based on data from 30 countries indicate that tax compliance internationally is positively related to the level of economic freedom, the level of importance of the equity market and the effectiveness of competition laws and high moral norms.     

Social security and the rise in health spending

In a quantitative model of Social Security with endogenous health, I argue that Social Security increases the aggregate health spending of the economy because it redistributes resources to the elderly whose marginal propensity to spend on health is high. I show by using computational experiments that the expansion of US Social Security can account for over a third of the dramatic rise in US health spending from 1950 to 2000. In addition, Social Security has a spill-over effect on Medicare. As Social Security increases health spending, it also increases the payments from Medicare, thus raising its financial burden.     

Company Tax Structure and Company Tax Incidence

This paper reviews conflicting theories of company tax incidence impliedby the alternative new and traditional views of dividends andexamines their contrasting policy implications. Whereas, under thetraditional view, closer integration of the corporate and personalincome tax systems is suggested, an alternative policy orientationemphasizing the non-distorting features of the classical system is impliedby the new view. Even if the traditional view is accepted, theimplications for design and reform of the company tax vary widely underalternative specifications of domestic and international tax policy objectives. Schedular alternatives to global income taxation are alsoconsidered.     

税收收入，GDP及我国宏观税负分析

经济是税收之根本，税收的增长离不开经济的增长，税收反作用于经济，这是经济与税收之间的一般规律，本分析了税收收入与GDP的各个构成要素之间的关系，并通过世界各国宏观税负的分析，结合我国的实际情况，提出了我国宏观税负的合理区间，论证了我国目前小口径宏观税负偏低，而大口径的宏观税负已处于一个较高的水平，进而得出了解决目前财政困难的措施是调整目前的政府收入结构，规范政府收入形式，而不宜走简单增税的路子。     

Tax coordination with different preferences for public goods: Conflict or harmony of interest?

The paper analyzes strategic commodity taxation in a model with trade in a single private good that is simultaneously imported by consumers of a high-tax country and exported by its producers. Conditions for the existence of a Nash equilibrium are given, and an asymmetry is introduced through different preferences for public goods. Two tax coordination measures are discussed—a minimum tax rate and a coordinated increase in the costs of cross-border shopping. It is shown that tax coordination generally benefits the high-tax country while the low-tax country will gain only if the intensity of tax competition is high in the initial equilibrium or if governments are pricesensitive toward the effective marginal costs of public good supply.     

Optimal portfolio and spending rules for endowment funds

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Prior studies show that investor learning about earnings-based return predictors from academic research erodes return predictability. However, the...     

税收竞争和税收套利对国际税收制度的挑战

当前被动投资的税收竞争、主动投资的税收竞争和税收套利等问题阻碍了单一税收原则和受惠原则的实践运用。本文介绍了税收竞争和税收套利对国际税收制度的挑战,并以OECD成员国的应对为例,阐述了OECD成员国不断与时俱进修订税收法规的历程,试图引起人们关注国际税收制度的完善。