This paper reviews the analytical and empirical evidence on certain issues in commodity tax design that have not received much attention. These include the impact on optimal commodity taxes of allowing the following: (i)non linear Engel curves, (ii)Household composition and child subsidy,...

With sufficiently well-reasoned and principled reform of tax systems, it is possible to achieve practical simplicity and a reduction in perverse incentives to a far greater degree than under any of the "flat-rate" proposals being advanced, without significant sacrifice of progressivity. But it...

Much attention has been given to the impact of fiscal competition on the level of public expenditure, but relatively little to the impact on its composition. Using a broadly familiar and reasonably rich model of fiscal competition in the presence of mobile capital, this paper establishes a...

Tax models come in all shapes and sizes, depending on the nature of the policy issues examined. The policy questions may relate to specific problems, concerning perhaps the revenue implications of a particular tax, or they may involve an extensive analysis of the cost and redistributice effects...

In the problem of optimal taxation in an economy with two productive factors, labor and capital, the optimal solution when the government can commit to a sequence of tax rates, has the tax on capital tending to zero in the limit, with all the tax burden on labour. It is well known, however, that...

We investigate the intergenerational welfare implications of Generational Accounting when it is used as the basis of intertemporal fiscal policy decisions. In particular, we consider an economy with a PAYGO social security system out of steady state due to a permanent fall in fertility.

This paper proposes a signaling model of fiscal stabilizations that offers a new perspective on why governments deviate from optimal tax smoothing. In our model, dependable -but not fully credible- governments have an incentive to tighten the fiscal regime when the signaling effect on credit...

The paper analyses optimal taxation of corporate profits when governments can choose both the rate and the base of the corporation tax, but are constrained to collect a given amount of corporate tax revenue. In a standard two-period model of investment and international mobility of portfolio...

This paper is structured as follows : First, we outline the problem of fiscal policy and growth in Cote d'Ivoire. Second, we describe the critical economic and fiscal sequence of events in the country from 1970 to 1989. This lets us build up a comprehensive model that allows a discussion of the...

This paper analyses the effects of inflation on Ivoiran fiscal variables by using the Aghevli-Khan model (1978) to estimate the time required for a change in the consumer price index to be fully reflected in the variables.