Malaysia’s Taxation System: Contemporary Practices, Issues and Future Direction offers a clear and concise analysis of Malaysia’s taxation system in terms of its origin and its adaptation to changing economic and social conditions. With unique insights from experienced legal, accounting, and tax practitioners and eminent academics, this book highlights the need for a holistic review of the taxation system going forward as the country strives for high-income status in the near future.
This paper explores how fiscal policy can affect medium- to long-term growth. It identifies the main channels through which fiscal policy can influence growth and distills practical lessons for policymakers. The particular mix of policy measures, however, will depend on country-specific conditions, capacities, and preferences. The paper draws on the Fund’s extensive technical assistance on fiscal reforms as well as several analytical studies, including a novel approach for country studies, a statistical analysis of growth accelerations following fiscal reforms, and simulations of an endogenous growth model.
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.
This book examines the present status, recent tax reforms and planned tax policies in some South and East Asia countries since the 1990s. The evidence is presented in a user friendly manner, but at the same time uses technically sophisticated methods. The main countries studied are China, India, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and Thailand. It is unique for being the first systematic treatment of the topic: hitherto, the information available has been widely dispersed and difficult to access. It should prove to be a natural companion to two previous books on taxation published by Routledge and also edited by Luigi Bernardi.
Malaysia was once on the cusp of becoming one of the ‘Asian Tigers’ as a result of the impressively high growth rates recorded in the early 1990s. From 1990 until 1997, the growth rate was above 9 percent per annum on average. This performance came to an end when the economy was struck by the 1997/98 Asian Financial Crisis, the worst economic crisis Malaysia has ever experienced since independence. Things eventually worsened with the onslaught of the 2008/09 Global Financial Crisis, which dragged the Malaysian economy yet into another round of a recession with the growth rate contracting at 1.5 percent in 2009. On hindsight, these two events, which have had a substantial impact on the state of the Malaysian economy, pointed to several urgent calls for economic reforms, such as the need to address structural weaknesses of the economy and to have a growth target which is both sustainable as well as inclusive. When Datuk Seri Najib Razak became the sixth Prime Minister of Malaysia from April 2009 until May 2018, it was clear that a new approach to economic development for Malaysia had to be crafted. Towards this end, he introduced the National Transformation Policy (NTP), so that the economy can be transformed into one that is of high-income and developed status by the year 2020. He also set a new vision for Malaysia, also known as the 2050 National Transformation, or TN50, which is meant to chart a new course for Malaysia to move into the second half of the 21st century. How successful is this transformational agenda? What are the other issues and challenges which need to be addressed? What important lessons can we learn from this transformational journey? This book is an attempt to address these specific questions by assessing Najib’s economic plans, policies, programmes and vision which evolved during the nine years of his term as the sixth Prime Minister of Malaysia.
Sint Maarten’s economy has been hit hard over the last 4 years. In 2017, two major hurricanes struck the island causing significant damage. While reconstruction was largely financed by insurance proceeds and grants from The Netherlands, economic recovery from the hurricane damage was slow and in early 2020 the coronavirus pandemic shut down most of Sint Maarten’s tourism sector. As a result, fiscal revenue declined by 15 percent since 2016; payroll tax revenue declined by only 4.5 percent, whereas the turnover tax revenue declined by 23 percent. Since April 2020, The Netherlands has provided immediate financial support to cushion the economic shock of the pandemic. In December 2020, Sint Maarten concluded an agreement with The Netherlands to receive more substantial financial support for recovery and ensuring long-term fiscal sustainability. In return, the authorities committed to make structural changes to their tax system, making it more growth-friendly and equitable, while optimizing and ensuring its revenue mobilization capacity.
Tax compliance costs tend to be disproportionately higher for small and young businesses. This paper examines how the quality of tax administration affects firm performance for a large sample of firms in emerging market and developing economies. We construct a novel, internationally comparable, and multidimensional index of tax administration quality (the TAQI) using information from the Tax Administration Diagnostic Assessment Tool. We show that better tax administration attenuates the productivity gap of small and young firms relative to larger and older firms, a result that is robust to controlling for other aspects of tax policy and of economic governance, alternative definitions of small and young firms, and measures of the quality of tax administration. From a policy perspective, we provide evidence that countries can reap growth and productivity dividends from improvements in tax administration that lower compliance costs faced by firms.
