As billionaires dance in the halls of the second Trump administration, it’s haunting how well Plutarch’s two-thousand-year-old words describe the state of American politics. It’s a barren landscape of plutocratic insatiability. *** How did it get this way? *** One way to tell the story is...

This report analyses the Scottish Government's Budget for 2025-26, with chapters on tax strategy, school spending, public sector pay and more.

Council tax is levied on the occupiers of residential property to help fund the provision of local services. Individual Scottish councils set the tax rates for their area, but it is the Scottish Government that determines the tax base to which the tax rates apply. With properties still assigned...

The Scottish Government has a range of tax powers at its disposal, which it has used in recent years to forge an increasingly distinct tax policy from the rest of the UK. In its 2025-26 Budget, the Scottish Government made a number of tax policy changes, including to income tax, business rates,...

Within a two-country model, this paper identifies a novel emission leakage channel that is caused by moral behavior of (atomistic) consumers. In a non-cooperative emission tax game between the countries, the leakage effect lowers the governments' marginal benefit of emission taxation, so...

The introduction of the Value Added Tax (VAT) has been widely perceived as a successful instrument, boosting government revenue and stimulating industrialization. However, in countries that are heavily dependent on exports of natural resources the introduction of the VAT has led on average to...

Dual-regime business tax systems typically subject smaller firms to an output (turnover) tax and larger firms to a profit (corporate) tax. Despite their prevalence, there is little formal analysis of their optimal design. This paper addresses this gap by developing a theoretical framework to...

The introduction of the Value Added Tax (VAT) has been widely perceived as a successful instrument, boosting government revenue and stimulating industrialization. However, in countries that are heavily dependent on exports of natural resources the introduction of the VAT has led on average to...

We propose a theoretical model in which uninformed consumers update their beliefs about the health effects of sugar in soft drinks through two sequential policies: an information campaign and a sugar tax. The information campaign is modeled as a costless signal (cheap talk), while the tax policy...

This Flash Eurobarometer investigates EU citizens' attitudes and preferences towards taxation and tax policy. It examines key themes, such as EU citizens' perception of the desired tax mix - that is, the adequate balance between different types of taxes like income, consumption taxes (e.g. VAT),...

This Flash Eurobarometer investigates EU citizens' attitudes and preferences towards taxation and tax policy. It examines key themes, such as EU citizens' perception of the desired tax mix - that is, the adequate balance between different types of taxes like income, consumption taxes (e.g. VAT),...

Purpose - Identify the relationship between the amount of taxes and their payment by a digital enterprise and develop recommendations for improving the quality of e-commerce taxation. Research methodology - On the basis of dialectical and systematic methods, the influence of the amount of the...

The aim of this paper is to provide a legal documentation that is conducted under a thorough review of tax legislation and create a dataset, consisting of 120 laws that brought significant changes in the vast majority of categories of taxes in Greece from 1974 to 2018. It is noteworthy that a...

Niger faces significant challenges to mobilize revenue, with one of the lowest tax revenue to GDP ratios in the region. This paper estimates the tax revenue gap, which reflects the difference between the actual and the potential tax revenue given economic and institutional context. The tax...

The objective of this note is to summarize the role of behavioral science in tax compliance and tax administration, elaborating on a previous note outlining the World Bank's past work in this area (Dalton et al., 2021). This note will provide an overview of a behaviorally informed approach to...

We continue the discussion of the taxation game following our presentation in [12]. Our concept describes a cooperative game played between a set of jurisdictions (" countries"). These players admit the operation of a multinational enterprise (MNE, the "firm") within their jurisdiction. The...

Within a two-country model, this paper identifies a novel emission leakage channel that is caused by moral behavior of (atomistic) consumers. In a non-cooperative emission tax game between the countries, the leakage effect lowers the governments’ marginal benefit of emission taxation, so...

Council tax is levied on the occupiers of residential property to help fund the provision of local services. Individual Scottish councils set the tax rates for their area, but it is the Scottish Government that determines the tax base to which the tax rates apply. With properties still assigned...

The Scottish Government has a range of tax powers at its disposal, which it has used in recent years to forge an increasingly distinct tax policy from the rest of the UK. In its 2025-26 Budget, the Scottish Government made a number of tax policy changes, including to income tax, business rates,...

This paper shows that bargaining over tax payments is an important feature of tax compliance and enforcement in lower income countries. Analyzing the universe of administrative tax filings from Zambia, we document sharp bunching in (i) dominated regions above tax schedule discontinuities,...

This paper assesses the feasibility of developing a tax and benefit microsimulation model in Rwanda. Tax-benefit microsimulation can be used to explore ways in which national development goals can be achieved in a cost-effective manner, and to assess the distributional effects of more...

Aid diversion poses a significant challenge to aid-recipient countries by depleting vital resources and hindering sustainable development. In many developing nations, high levels of corruption raise concerns about whether aid funds reach their intended destination. This paper studies the impact...

Purpose: The paper aims to identify the factors that impact the budget revenues of countries in ASEAN economies. Design/methodology/approach: The paper applies fixed effect and random effect models on a 25-year database of ASEAN economies from 1991 to 2020. Findings: The research reveals that...

Taxation of cross-border services has been identified as a high priority issue in the United Nations (UN) negotiations to establish a new global framework for tax. This paper analyses the defects of international tax rules as applied to services, and their exploitation by multinational...

The new Chancellor faces a difficult fiscal inheritance. Her choices on tax and spending at this first Budget could define the rest of the parliament.

The financial losses recorded by Gazprom in 2023 driven by collapsing gas export revenue point to a wider transition in the role of the company, which has been at the heart of Russia's energy economy since the Soviet period. In the pre-crisis period, Gazprom was able to subsidize gas supply to...

Should the government raise capital gains tax in the Budget? What is the case for reforming capital gains tax? What are the options for reform?

This paper compares two important sources of tax revenue statistics for African countries, namely the Africa Tax Administration Forum's African Tax Outlook and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research Government Revenue Dataset. We consider the background,...

This "explainer" looks at how the parties' proposals would affect Scotland and Wales, covering tax, spending, public finances and the constitution.

What has happened to average incomes, inequality, poverty, jobs and pay since 2009 and since 2019? How does the UK compare internationally?

This chapter of our second annual Budget Report looks beyond 2024-25 to the medium-term outlook for the Scottish Government's funding, and the implications of the funding picture for the choices and trade-offs faced when allocating funding between areas of the budget. The Scottish Government had...