Countries around the world are decentralizing in various ways. Many studies have evaluated such reforms and their effects on corruption, stability and growth as well as on the provision of such services as health and education. Decentralization is often intended in part to make government...

Infrastructure finance has been much discussed recently. We first present a brief argument about the importance of establishing what we call the Wicksellian Connection – a clear and meaningful linkage between expenditures and revenues – essentially because unless it is decided who is going...

Over 330 million people live in India’s cities; 35 cities have a population of over a million and three (Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata) of the 10 largest metropolises in the world are in India. India’s cities are large, economically important, and growing. However, neither urban infrastructure...

This paper considers the proposition that recent tax policy trends have been decisively influenced by tax research. In both the OECD countries and developing countries, the two most important changes in tax systems in recent decades have been the introduction of the VAT and the general lowering...

Canada is not a country with a reputation for bold experimentation. However, Canadian experience demonstrates conclusively that an invoice-credit, destination-based value-added tax (VAT) is workable at the subnational level, with both federal and provincial governments retaining full control...

We argue in this paper that unless China begins to tackle more systematically the serious problems that have emerged in the finances of its various levels of sub-national government the problems to which the present unsatisfactory system give rise will over time increasingly distort resource...

The case for decentralizing taxes does not imply that these taxes need to be administered locally. Nor is it is necessarily constrained by the weakness of local tax administration. Tax decentralization and the decentralization of tax administration are related but separable decisions. As...

Canadians developed and implemented a sales tax system that no one in their right mind would have designed from scratch. Nonetheless, more by accident than design, Canada ended up being a bold innovator in sales tax policy and administration in several important respects. For decades, academics...