This report provides an up-to-date assessment of the scale and distributional impact of tax relief on public, occupational, and private pension contributions in Ireland. Using SWITCH, the ESRI's tax-benefit microsimulation model, we quantify the cost of tax relief under the current...

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:...

Metadaten, Metadatenmanagement, StandardisierungDas Statistische Bundesamt steht ständig vor der Herausforderung, deutlich größere Datenvolumen zu verarbeiten; zugleich steigen die Erwartungen der Öffentlichkeit an die Aktualität und Granularität der amtlichen Statistiken. Aktuelle...

Despite the central role of corporate tax departments in managing multinational enterprises' (MNEs) global tax positions, little is known about how their internal design shapes corporate tax behavior. Drawing on hand-collected data on more than 8,000 tax employees across 309 publicly listed...

The US government in 2025 imposed a $100,000 tax on each high-skill foreign worker entering with an H-1B work visa. The only public economic justification calculates the tax to offset an estimated wage penalty for H-1B workers relative to US natives. But this estimate suffers from substantial...

The funding available to a government determines the choices available to it - including what public services and benefits to provide, whether to charge co-payments for services, and if so at what level. Such choices especially affect households on low and middle incomes, and particularly those...

This paper explores the role of informal taxation in the Democratic Republic of Congo and aims to shed light on informal fiscal realities and the implications of informal tax institutions for governance and state legitimacy. Relying on mixed-methods data from household surveys, interviews, and...

Metadaten, Metadatenmanagement, StandardisierungDas Statistische Bundesamt steht ständig vor der Herausforderung, deutlich größere Datenvolumen zu verarbeiten; zugleich steigen die Erwartungen der Öffentlichkeit an die Aktualität und Granularität der amtlichen Statistiken. Aktuelle...

Using Stochastic Frontier Analysis, this paper updates, for 123 countries, the estimates of tax capacity-defined as the maximum level of revenue a country can feasibly achieve - and tax effort - measured as the ratio of actual tax revenue to tax capacity. It also introduces two novel models that...

This article introduces Green EUROMOD, the environmental extension of the EU's tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD. It provides a novel framework for evaluating the distributional, environmental, and fiscal impacts of green policy reforms across the 27 EU Member States. The model captures...

Since its inception, the Welsh Government has had powers over local taxation - determining the structure of council tax (with councils then setting the headline tax rate) and the structure and level of business rates. The late 2010s saw the Welsh Government gain powers over a number of other...

The Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL) is a tax on pre-packaged soft drinks with added sugar. Introduced in 2018, the government's stated aim was to reduce obesity (especially among children) by reducing the amount of added sugar in soft drinks, and encouraging consumers to switch to less sugary...

The late 2010s saw the Scottish Government gain powers over several existing taxes (most notably income tax) and benefits (mainly related to disability), as well as powers to create new benefits. Devolved taxes now account for around 33% of all tax revenue raised in Scotland. On the benefits...

The Scottish Budget and Spending Review published on 13 January set detailed spending plans for 2026-27, alongside higher-level plans for the following two years for day-to-day (resource) spending and the following three years for investment (capital) spending. Understandably, the Scottish...

The funding available to a government determines the choices available to it - including what public services and benefits to provide, whether to charge co-payments for services, and if so at what level. Such choices especially affect households on low and middle incomes, and particularly those...

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...