In Global Perspectives on Income Taxation Law, Avi-Yonah covers basic, corporate and international tax law from a comparative perspective. The book both supplements readings in U.S. tax law courses and serves as a textbook for a comparative tax law class. It is arranged by subject matter in the order in which they are usually covered in U.S. tax law classes. The materials are drawn from a wide variety of countries, including developing countries.
The authors introduce students to the various ways that nations other than the United States resolve contemporary constitutional questions. Covering both structural issues and individual rights, each chapter presents foreign case materials on a particular topic, comparing U.S and other nations' laws.
Edited by Victor Thuronyi, this book offers an introduction to a broad range of issues in comparative tax law and is based on comparative discussion of the tax laws of developed countries. It presents practical models and guidelines for drafting tax legislation that can be used by officials of developing and transition countries. Volume I covers general issues, some special topics, and major taxes other than income tax.
This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.
This is the first book to give a collective treatment of philosophical issues relating to tax. The tax system is central to the operation of states and to the ways in which states interact with individual citizens. Taxes are used by states to fund the provision of public goods and public services, to engage in direct or indirect forms of redistribution, and to mould the behaviour of individual citizens. As the contributors to this volume show, there are a number of pressing and thorny philosophical issues relating to the tax system, and these issues often connect in fascinating ways with foundational questions regarding property rights, public justification, democracy, state neutrality, stability, political psychology, and other moral and political issues. Many of these deep and fascinating philosophical questions about tax have not received as much sustained attention as they clearly merit. The aim of advancing the debate about tax in political philosophy has both general and more specific aspects, ranging across both over-arching issues regarding the tax system as a whole and more specific issues relating to particular forms of tax policy. Thinking clearly about tax is not an easy task, as much that is of central importance is missed if one proceeds at too great a level of abstraction, and issues of conceptual and normative importance often only come sharply into focus when viewed against real-world questions of implementation and feasibility. Serious philosophical work on the tax system will often therefore need to be interdisciplinary, and so the discussion in this book includes a number of scholars whose expertise spans across neighbouring disciplines to philosophy, including political science, economics, public policy, and law.
Tax law is political. This book highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impacts tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume, assembled by two law professors who work in the field, is an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It is a resource not only for scholars and students in the fields of taxation and economics, but also for those who engage with critical race theory, feminist legal theory, queer theory, class-based analysis, and social justice generally. Tax is the one area of law that affects everyone in our society, and this book is crucial to understanding its impact.
Although the details of tax law are literally endless—differing not only from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but also from day-to-day—structures and patterns exist across tax systems that can be understood with relative ease. This book, now in an updated new edition, focuses on these essential patterns. It provides an immensely useful introduction to the core common knowledge that any well-informed tax lawyer or policy maker should have about comparative tax law in our times. The busy reader will welcome the compact nature of this work, which is shorter than the first edition and can be read in a weekend if one skips footnotes. The authors elucidate the commonalities and differences across countries in areas including (much of the detail new to the second edition): • general anti-avoidance rules; • court decisions striking down tax laws as violating constitutional rules against retroactivity, unequal treatment of equals, confiscation, and undue vagueness; • statutory interpretation; • inflation adjustment rules and the allowance for corporate equity; • value added tax systems; • concepts such as “tax”, “capital gain”, “tax avoidance”, and “partnership”; • corporate-shareholder tax systems; • the relationship between tax and financial accounting; • taxation of investment income; • tax authorities’ ability to obtain and process information about taxpayers; and • systems of appeals from tax assessments. The information and analysis pull together valuable material which is scattered over a disparate literature, much of it not available in English. Especially considering the dynamic nature of tax law, whose rate of change exceeds that of any other field of law, the authors’ clear identification of the underlying patterns and fundamental structures that all tax systems have in common—as well as where the differences lie—guides the reader and offers resources for further research.
In 'Global Perspectives on Income Taxation Law', Avi-Yonah covers basic, corporate and international tax law from a comparative perspective. The book both supplements readings in U.S. tax law courses and serves as a textbook for a comparative tax law class.
Modern-day tax treaties have their foundations in one of the three Model Tax Treaties developed by the League of Nations in 1928. Using previously unexplored archival material, Sunita Jogarajan provides the first in-depth examination of the development of the League's Models. This new research provides insights into questions such as the importance of double taxation versus tax evasion; the preference for source-taxation versus residence-taxation; the influence of theory and practice on the League's work; the development of bilateral rather than multilateral treaties; the influence of developing countries on the League's work; the role of Commentary in interpreting model tax treaties; and the influential factors and key individuals involved. A better understanding of the development of the original models will inform and help guide interpretation and reform of modern-day tax treaties. Additionally, this book will be of interest to scholars of international relations and the development of law at international organisations.
