Taxation: The Lost History

Regular, periodic taxation is a function of modern government, a practice that arose only because the rent of land and natural resources was transformed from the traditional source of public revenue in the Middle Ages to private property, starting in the 17th century. In the earlier era, taxes (special exactions on ordinary income and daily necessities) were imposed only under unusual circumstances, usually to fight wars. The French Physiocrats and their student, Adam Smith, proposed that the best form of modern taxation would be based on the same principle as the medieval system—a fee derived entirely from surpluses, not imposed as a burden on production. This was actually what Adam Smith meant by “ability to pay.” Smith's sophisticated understanding of economic rent was, however, simplified and distorted by numerous economists throughout the 19th century, who buried the concept under layers of obfuscation. In particular, the substitution of “Paretian rent” for “Ricardian rent” committed the fallacy of composition by shifting rent from a social concept to a private, unit‐level concept, which caused social surplus to simply “disappear.” Bringing this “lost history” to light permits us to re‐evaluate how modern societies might benefit from Smith's physiocratic concept of taxation. This work not only traces debates about rent—for example, whether rent arises from risk‐taking, or whether a tax on rent raises commodity prices—but also discusses the practical benefits of taxing it today.     

Welfare Taxation: Opting Out to Shrink the State

Spending on welfare has resisted reform and remains the biggest obstacle to cutting taxes in Britain. Colin Clark, now teaching at the University of Queensland, suggests the radical measure of allowing taxpayers to keep their taxes and choose between competing private suppliers of state health care, education, pensions, and other 'services'.     

Managing the Public Debt: The Optimal Taxation Approach

This paper examines research on public debt management, focusing on debt structure by denomination, indexation features, and maturity. The optimal taxation approach is reviewed and its policy implications are related to the trade-off between minimization of the expected cost of debt servicing and minimization of budgetary risk. Strong arguments are provided for debt instruments which yield low returns when output and hence revenues are lower and public spending higher than expected. This debt design minimizes tax distortions and provides flexibility in conducting fiscal policy. The exact characterization of the debt composition which supports efficient taxation depends on the stochastic structure of the economy. Long-term nominal debt is a hedge against supply shocks affecting revenues and inflation and makes the government budget insensitive to interest-rate risk. However, at high levels of debt, the extent of insurance or flexibility that governments can obtain by issuing long-term nominal debt is limited by the need to maintain the credibility of the anti-inflation stance.     

Urban Housing in Mainland China: A New Chapter

Based on the results of field work conducted during 1997 and 1998 in Beijing, Shanghi, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Ningbo, this paper sets out a modest agenda. It briefly reviews China's urban housing initiatives to date, then questions whether these form part of a coherent and comprehensive housing strategy. While focusing on issues rather than data; it ends by stressing that planning without adequate facts is problematic. The authors have not aimed to provide a detailed account of China's housing reform history, since this is documented extensively in numerous research studies. The spotlight is on questions that still need to be answered, rather than on the more ambitious task of prescribing a blueprint for simultaneously resolving all the issues at hand.     

Taxation and Economic Growth

A bstract The effects of vorious tax policies on economic growth are recx amined on the basis of the recently developed endogenous growth therory The assertion of Henry George that the structure of taxation is more important than the level of taxation in explaining economic growth is elaborated and verified Annual data for Taiwan from 1954 to 1986 shows that the aggregate tax rate does not have significant effect on the long run growth rates of private ouptup, consumption and production factor inputs This result is due to the poostivie effect of consumption taxation offsetting the negative effect of factor taxation on economic growth