The digitalization of low-income economies has made it easier for governments to collect tax, yet many still fail to raise adequate revenues. Why would policy makers in urgent need of resources not fully leverage these new tools? I argue that governments remain constrained by public opinion:...

As billionaires dance in the halls of the second Trump administration, it’s haunting how well Plutarch’s two-thousand-year-old words describe the state of American politics. It’s a barren landscape of plutocratic insatiability. *** How did it get this way? *** One way to tell the story is...

This report analyses the Scottish Government's Budget for 2025-26, with chapters on tax strategy, school spending, public sector pay and more.

Council tax is levied on the occupiers of residential property to help fund the provision of local services. Individual Scottish councils set the tax rates for their area, but it is the Scottish Government that determines the tax base to which the tax rates apply. With properties still assigned...

The Scottish Government has a range of tax powers at its disposal, which it has used in recent years to forge an increasingly distinct tax policy from the rest of the UK. In its 2025-26 Budget, the Scottish Government made a number of tax policy changes, including to income tax, business rates,...

Within a two-country model, this paper identifies a novel emission leakage channel that is caused by moral behavior of (atomistic) consumers. In a non-cooperative emission tax game between the countries, the leakage effect lowers the governments' marginal benefit of emission taxation, so...

The introduction of the Value Added Tax (VAT) has been widely perceived as a successful instrument, boosting government revenue and stimulating industrialization. However, in countries that are heavily dependent on exports of natural resources the introduction of the VAT has led on average to...

Im Zuge der Grundsteuerreform im Jahr 2019 wurde eine neue Bundesstatistik zu den Grundsteuerwerten des land- und forstwirtschaftlichen Vermögens sowie des Grundvermögens angeordnet. Bei der Ermittlung der Bewertungsgrundlagen für die Grundsteuer werden umfangreiche Informationen über...

The digitalization of low-income economies has made it easier for governments to collect tax, yet many still fail to raise adequate revenues. Why would policy makers in urgent need of resources not fully leverage these new tools? I argue that governments remain constrained by public opinion:...

Im Zuge der Grundsteuerreform im Jahr 2019 wurde eine neue Bundesstatistik zu den Grundsteuerwerten des land- und forstwirtschaftlichen Vermögens sowie des Grundvermögens angeordnet. Bei der Ermittlung der Bewertungsgrundlagen für die Grundsteuer werden umfangreiche Informationen über...

This paper shows that bargaining over tax payments is an important feature of tax compliance and enforcement in lower income countries. Analyzing the universe of administrative tax filings from Zambia, we document sharp bunching in (i) dominated regions above tax schedule discontinuities,...

Niger faces significant challenges to mobilize revenue, with one of the lowest tax revenue to GDP ratios in the region. This paper estimates the tax revenue gap, which reflects the difference between the actual and the potential tax revenue given economic and institutional context. The tax...

The objective of this note is to summarize the role of behavioral science in tax compliance and tax administration, elaborating on a previous note outlining the World Bank's past work in this area (Dalton et al., 2021). This note will provide an overview of a behaviorally informed approach to...

Dual-regime business tax systems typically subject smaller firms to an output (turnover) tax and larger firms to a profit (corporate) tax. Despite their prevalence, there is little formal analysis of their optimal design. This paper addresses this gap by developing a theoretical framework to...

The introduction of the Value Added Tax (VAT) has been widely perceived as a successful instrument, boosting government revenue and stimulating industrialization. However, in countries that are heavily dependent on exports of natural resources the introduction of the VAT has led on average to...

We propose a theoretical model in which uninformed consumers update their beliefs about the health effects of sugar in soft drinks through two sequential policies: an information campaign and a sugar tax. The information campaign is modeled as a costless signal (cheap talk), while the tax policy...

This Flash Eurobarometer investigates EU citizens' attitudes and preferences towards taxation and tax policy. It examines key themes, such as EU citizens' perception of the desired tax mix - that is, the adequate balance between different types of taxes like income, consumption taxes (e.g. VAT),...

This Flash Eurobarometer investigates EU citizens' attitudes and preferences towards taxation and tax policy. It examines key themes, such as EU citizens' perception of the desired tax mix - that is, the adequate balance between different types of taxes like income, consumption taxes (e.g. VAT),...

The aim of this paper is to provide a legal documentation that is conducted under a thorough review of tax legislation and create a dataset, consisting of 120 laws that brought significant changes in the vast majority of categories of taxes in Greece from 1974 to 2018. It is noteworthy that a...

Council tax is levied on the occupiers of residential property to help fund the provision of local services. Individual Scottish councils set the tax rates for their area, but it is the Scottish Government that determines the tax base to which the tax rates apply. With properties still assigned...

Within a two-country model, this paper identifies a novel emission leakage channel that is caused by moral behavior of (atomistic) consumers. In a non-cooperative emission tax game between the countries, the leakage effect lowers the governments’ marginal benefit of emission taxation, so...

We continue the discussion of the taxation game following our presentation in [12]. Our concept describes a cooperative game played between a set of jurisdictions (" countries"). These players admit the operation of a multinational enterprise (MNE, the "firm") within their jurisdiction. The...

The Scottish Government has a range of tax powers at its disposal, which it has used in recent years to forge an increasingly distinct tax policy from the rest of the UK. In its 2025-26 Budget, the Scottish Government made a number of tax policy changes, including to income tax, business rates,...