Objectives. Starting from the idea that tax equity requirements, administration costs and the tendency towards tax evasion determine the design of tax systems, it is important to identify a satisfactory efficiency/equity deal in order to build a tax system as close to optimum requirements as...

This paper shows that actual systems of intergovernmental transfers are incompletely specified when viewed as mechanisms that operate over time, and that the norms of evolution most frequently used do not preserve the distributive properties they have at their initial position. We argue that...