The Political Economy of Tax Reform

Front Cover
Takatoshi Ito, Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, Dec 1, 2007 - Business & Economics - 358 pages
The rapid emergence of East Asia as an important geopolitical-economic entity has been one of the most visible and striking changes in the international economy in recent years. With that emergence has come an increased need for understanding the problems of interdependence. As a step toward meeting this need, the National Bureau of Economic Research joined with the Korea Development Institute to sponsor this volume, which focuses on the complexities of tax reform in a global economy.

Experts from Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, Japan, and Thailand, as well as the United States, Canada, and Israel examine the major tax programs of the 1980s and their domestic and international economic effects. The analyses reveal similarities between the United States and countries in East Asia in political constraints on policy making, and taken together they show how growing interdependence interacts with domestic economic and political concerns to affect issues as politically vital as tax reform. Economists, policymakers, and members of the business community will benefit from these studies.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
1
Part I
7
Part II
67
Part III
157
Contributors
339
Author Index
341
Subject Index
344
Copyright

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Page 97 - Policy. CHARLES E. MCLURE JR. is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Page 101 - There is nothing, absolutely nothing in the history or politics of the income tax that indicates that any of these schemes have the slightest hope of being enacted in the forms proposed.
Page 30 - Slemrod, Joel. 1988. International capital mobility and the theory of capital income taxation. In Uneasy compromise: Problems of a hybrid income-consumption tax, ed.
Page 62 - ... appropriate economic policies. Consensus among the political parties on broad principles of tax policy is also necessary. Fifth, while fiscal incentives have a role to play in tax policy, that role is quite limited. The effectiveness of fiscal incentives is less likely to depend on the incentives' characteristics than on the characteristics of the countries where they are used. In countries where it is not feasible to keep within reasonable bounds the economic rent that arises from the incentive...
Page 65 - Presented at the Conference on Tax Policy and Economic Development among Pacific Asian Countries (Taipei, 1990). Sunley, Emil M., and Randall D. Weiss, "The Revenue Estimating Process,
Page 246 - ... exemption for estate tax purposes.1 The Tax Reform Act of 1976 combined the separate estate and gift tax rates into a unified transfer tax system. In addition, the 1976 Act converted the prior estate and gift tax exemptions into a unified credit. With the unified credit, the gift or estate tax is first computed without any exemption and then the unified, credit is subtracted to determine the amount of gift or estate tax payable before the allowance of other credits. The amount of the unified...
Page 105 - Consequently, the initial Treasury I plan was an astonishingly pure expression of expert views. Although never formally proposed as legislation, it — rather than current law — set the standard against which subsequent proposals were measured.
Page 274 - General, a description of and statement of the true value of all the property owned by the decedent at the time of his death and having its situs outside...
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About the author (2007)

Takatoshi Ito is professor of economics at Hitotsubashi University and author of The Japanese Economy. Anne O. Krueger is Arts and Sciences Professor of Economics at Duke University and author of Perspectives on Trade and Employment, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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