New Zealand law provides for no special tax consequences on the formation of trusts. Transfers to trusts are taxable or non-taxable pursuant to the same rules that apply in respect of transfers to other people or entities. However, because there is more likely to be an element of gift in...

In the mid 1990s, New Zealand began a project to rewrite the country’s income tax legislation. The first step of the rewrite was to reorder and reenact the 1976 Income Tax Act as the Income Tax Act 1994. Although the rewrite attempted clarify and simplify the legislation to make it more...

This paper offers an historical, economic, constitutional, and contextual survey of the New Zealand tax system. The focus is on income tax, but the paper also briefly describes the “goods services tax”, the name given to the New Zealand value added tax. The focus is on domestic taxation, but...

This paper explores the taxation of corporations in the wider context of capital income taxation. The pros and cons of various income-based and cash-flow forms of corporation tax (CT) are discussed. The paper concludes that the dual income tax (DIT), which taxes all capital income at the...

This paper investigates the impact of tax simplification on various indicators of the efficiency of the tax system and on the distribution of income. The analysis is based on a simulation model (FiFoSiM) using German income tax and household survey microdata. We model tax simplification as the...

The potential economic outcomes resulting from a flat rate of income tax have been the subject of an ongoing academic and political debate. Many observers have suggested that the introduction of a flat tax would be beneficial for a country's economy, having a positive influence on the labor...