TAX REFORMS IN EAST ASIAN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: Motivations, directions, and implications

This first presents an overview of the level and structure of taxation in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. It then briefly reviews the available literature on tax reform, country by country. It finally gives a comparative analysis, focusing primarily on tax mix and tax structure, and the importance attached to tax administration.     

THE INCOME DISTRIBUTION IN JAPAN

In this paper the author has atempted to clarify the characteristic of the chanes in he income distribution in post-war Japan, in particular from he viewpoint of income equalization. The problem of equaliation in income distribution is the most important one for every welfare state, and in the case of Japan, there is a willingnes to create a welfare state, whether the trend of income distribution trends towards equalizations or not is attracting increasing atention among he authorities and among persons having an interest in Japanee affaris. The results of the author's analyses show an equalization trend up to 1949; an unequalization trend after 950; and again an equalization trend from around 1965.     

INTERRELATIONAL INCOME DISTRIBUTION IN BRAZIL

We extend Miyazawa and Masegi's original idea of disaggregated interrelational income multipliers with regard to three aspects. First, we examine the effect of system closure on the inter‐income‐group matrix. Second, we formally include inter‐household transactions, or the informal economy, into Miyazawa's calculus. Third, we extend the interrelational multiplier to environmental factors. These extensions are applied to the Brazilian economy of 1995. Multiplier matrices excluding and including the informal economy are presented and interpreted, and the redistributive process of transfer payments is traced through consecutive spending rounds for various scenarios. Finally, these redistributive processes are enumerated in terms of transport fuel and electricity use. Our results indicate that, because of the distribution of ownership of productive capital, the income formation process is heavily skewed toward the highest incomes. Whether the existing process and potential redistributive policies alleviate environmental pressure depends on the factors as well as the population segment appraised.     

DIVERSIFICATION OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IN SOME SOUTH-EAST ASIAN COUNTRIES

An attempt is made in this paper to study the diversification of agricultural production attained during the 1950's by some of the Southeast Asian countries. Diversification of agricultural production was thought to be one of the important steps towards the transformation of a colonial economy into a national one. Characteristics of the colonial economy in the context of conditions around 1950 have been exhaustively studied from time to time.¹ During the subsequent years, however, conditions changed and new forms of dependence on the metropolitan countries emerged. These were summarized by the term neo-colonialism, the main characteristics of which are dependence on foreign collaboration for industrialization and chronic foreign exchange difficulties. It is not necessary to go into details of this problem in this paper.     

IMPORTED SKILL‐BIASED TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

This paper discusses the occurrence of skill‐enhancing technology import, namely, the relationship between imports of embodied technology and widening skill‐based employment differentials in low‐ and middle‐income countries. Generalized method of moments (GMM) techniques are applied to an original panel dataset comprising 28 manufacturing sectors for 23 countries over a decade. Econometric results provide robust evidence of the determinants of widening employment differentials in low‐ and middle‐income countries. In particular, the proposed empirical evidence indicates capital–skill complementarity as a possible source of skill bias, while imported skill‐enhancing technology emerges as an additional driver of increasing demand for the skilled workers in these countries.