New Zealand currently charges some classes of capital gains to income tax, but there is no tax on capital gains as such. The Tax Working Group recently established by the government has however recommended that there should be such a tax. That is, it has recommended that New Zealand should, like...

This article reviews the case for taxing capital gains in New Zealand. The analogy is drawn between a taxation system and a medieval toll bridge. The wider the span of the bridge the more traffic can pass in the same time period. This can allow a reduction in the rate of toll, reducing the...

Effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) can be very different from the statutory rate and vary across firms, reflecting such factors as the extent and nature of taxable deductions (losses, depreciation), asset and ownership structures, and debt/equity financing. We estimate firm-specific EMTRs and...

This paper considers New Zealand's hybrid tax credit system consisting principally of a credit system combined with exemption features in respect of certain classes of income, both of which aim to provide relief to minimise the impact of foreign income being taxed in a foreign jurisdiction as...

The OECD has for several years been laboriously attempting to reform the international tax system so as to rectify the gross under-taxation of heavily digitalized firms such as Google, Facebook and eBay. Progress has been slow, though, so a number of countries, including New Zealand, have...