The (Callaghan) Retirement Income Review suggested that superannuation tax concessions are excessive, especially for those on higher incomes, and questioned their use other than to fund the superannuant’s living expenses. Favourable fiscal arrangements for superannuation are pervasive across...

Many Value-Added Taxes (VATs) or Goods and Services Taxes (GSTs) include a tax refund scheme for goods acquired by tourists when they visit the jurisdiction, and then return home. The policy, design and operation of tourist tax refund schemes have not been widely researched in the literature....

In 1995, John Howard, the newly elected leader of the Opposition, reflecting on the Coalition’s loss of the 1993 federal election on the back of the Labor government’s goods and services tax (GST) scare campaign, said ‘never ever’ for a GST. However, a year later, when the Coalition was...

Adopting and modifying the approach used by Hines and Rice (1994), we investigate the extent of crossborder profit shifting activities by foreign-owned Australian companies (FOACs) and evaluate the effectiveness of the measures implemented by the Australian government to combat base erosion and...

This paper makes the case for a more deliberate and expansive consideration of political economy issues in the context of Australian tax policy. Although there is a rich international literature analysing how political factors and institutions shape tax policy outcomes, with a few notable...

We examine the impact of the depreciation of the Australian dollar (AU$) on the expenditure of households with foreign-born members (HFBMs) in Australia. Employing a difference-in-differences methodology and using the 2013-2015 Nielson Homescan Panel Survey data, we find that HFBMs spent more on...

In philosophy, theories of welfare's nature abound. One of these is Canadian moral philosopher L.W. Sumner's (subjective) 'happiness theory of welfare', which he argues in his 1996 book 'Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics' (or 'WHE' for short) is "the best available … about the nature of welfare"...

Very little is known about the efficient collection of fines despite their indispensable contribution to local government budgets. This paper fills an important gap in the literature by studying the effectiveness of deterrence (enforcement) and non-deterrence (social norms) letters that aim to...

We study the incidence of capital income taxation in a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and lifecycle households. In this incomplete market setting, marginal excess burdens of three capital taxes, namely corporate income, dividend and capital gains taxes, are vastly...

The Full Federal Court decision in the Glencore Case raises very important questions in relation to core concepts underlying Australia’s previous and current transfer pricing rules. The case involves the pricing structure that an Australian mining company used for the copper concentrate it...