The authors observe that consumption taxation is superior to income taxation because it does not penalize saving and investment and propose that the U.S. income tax system be completely replaced by a progressive consumption tax. They argue that the X tax, developed by the late David Bradford, offers the best form of progressive consumption taxation for the United States and outline concrete proposals for the X tax's treatment of numerous specific economic issues.
The Japanese population is aging faster than any other in the world. The per centage of Japan's population aged 65 and above was only 7.1% in 1970,but just 30 years later, in 2000, it reached 17.2%. A declining birth rate and a rising average life expectancy will continue to push this trend further. This situation is causing serious problems for Japanese society.Structural reforms, especially tax and social security reforms, to accommodate this drastic demographic change have become an urgent policy issue. The purpose of this book is to establish guidelines for tax and social security reforms in Japan in terms that are both efficient and equitable. In this study, an extended life-cycle general equilibrium model is employed to rigorously take account of the rapidly aging Japanese population. The simulation approach adopted in our analysis permits us to calculate the effects of alternative policy packages on capital accumulation and economic welfare. This enables us to make proposals for concrete economic policies.
This volume presents papers which were given at a conference of the Liberty Fund, Washington, co-sponsored by the Carl-Menger Institute, Vienna. The conference took place in Vienna in January 1988. All papers were subject to a refereeing process; some of them had to be revised very extensively. The economics of progressive taxation have been a research topic ever since economists have dealt with the economic role of the state. Old puzzles are the best: the theoretical underpinning of progressivity still is not fully convincing, even after 200 years of economic research. In the present volume we succeeded in publishing some contributions of outstanding economists which present their visions of the topic. Niskanen distinguishes two types of contributions of public choice analysis to understanding and evaluating the tax and transfer system in modern economics: the positive analysis, which examines the issue of how a tax and transfer system would look if it were established by a government subject to majority rule; . and the normative analysis, which tries to discern an optimal system of taxes and transfers. In the normative case the author distinguishes between the "libertarian perspective", in which each person has full rights to any property that he has acquired legally and in which transfers are determined entirely by the preferences of the donors, and the so-called "constitutional perspective" , in which each person elects the rules affecting taxes without knowledge of his position in the post constitutional distribution.
This exercise and solutions manual accompanies the main edition of Introduction to Computational Economics Using Fortran. It enables students of all levels to practice the skills and knowledge needed to conduct economic research using Fortran. Introduction to Computational Economics Using Fortran is the essential guide to conducting economic research on a computer. Aimed at students of all levels of education as well as advanced economic researchers, it facilitates the first steps into writing programming language. This exercise and solutions manual is accompanied by a program database that readers are able to download.
We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twelve years of population data from Norway’s administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, during our sample period individuals earn markedly different average returns on their financial assets (a standard deviation of 14%) and on their net worth (a standard deviation of 8%). Second, heterogeneity in returns does not arise merely from differences in the allocation of wealth between safe and risky assets: returns are heterogeneous even within asset classes. Third, returns are positively correlated with wealth: moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of the financial wealth distribution increases the return by 3 percentage points - and by 17 percentage points when the same exercise is performed for the return to net worth. Fourth, wealth returns exhibit substantial persistence over time. We argue that while this persistence partly reflects stable differences in risk exposure and assets scale, it also reflects persistent heterogeneity in sophistication and financial information, as well as entrepreneurial talent. Finally, wealth returns are (mildly) correlated across generations. We discuss the implications of these findings for several strands of the wealth inequality debate.
Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modelling is a relatively new field in economics, however, it is rapidly becoming one of the most useful tools for policy evaluation. This book applies CGE modelling to some of the most urgent international economic policy problems, including the Kyoto Protocol, pension reform, and income taxation, and also analyses the methodological issues that arise.
Optimal tax design attempts to resolve a well-known trade-off: namely, that high taxes are bad insofar as they discourage people from working, but good to the degree that, by redistributing wealth, they help insure people against productivity shocks. Until recently, however, economic research on this question either ignored people's uncertainty about their future productivities or imposed strong and unrealistic functional form restrictions on taxes. In response to these problems, the new dynamic public finance was developed to study the design of optimal taxes given only minimal restrictions on the set of possible tax instruments, and on the nature of shocks affecting people in the economy. In this book, Narayana Kocherlakota surveys and discusses this exciting new approach to public finance. An important book for advanced PhD courses in public finance and macroeconomics, The New Dynamic Public Finance provides a formal connection between the problem of dynamic optimal taxation and dynamic principal-agent contracting theory. This connection means that the properties of solutions to principal-agent problems can be used to determine the properties of optimal tax systems. The book shows that such optimal tax systems necessarily involve asset income taxes, which may depend in sophisticated ways on current and past labor incomes. It also addresses the implications of this new approach for qualitative properties of optimal monetary policy, optimal government debt policy, and optimal bequest taxes. In addition, the book describes computational methods for approximate calculation of optimal taxes, and discusses possible paths for future research.
Nobel laureate Sir John Hicks has with good reason called the third quarter of the 1 twentieth century the age of Keynes • Sir John nevertheless diagnosed a crisis of Keynesian economics even before this period had expired. But if only a few gifted scholars had foreseen the crisis of Keynesian economics before 1975, this year at least marked the ultimate disenchantment of Keynesian economics. Keynesian economic policy proved ineffective to cope with the economic challenges of the late seventies: unemployment, inflation, and stagnation of economic growth. Alarmed governments resorted to more and more intense remedies out of the Keynesian box of Pandora. But all they got was the creation of additional difficulties, aggravating the situation still more: soaring public debt, extraordinary balance-of-payments deficits, and economic instability. It had been argued until quite recently that capi talism could have survived only "in the oxygen tent of government deficit spend 2 ing ". But it has become patent since the mid-seventies that it is first and foremost the Keynesian oxygen tent that has produced the present embarrassment of capital ist economies. The present economic malaise in nearly all Western countries has accordingly led to considerable unrest in the economics profession. Somewhat reminiscent of the thirties, a feverish search for alternatives to the prevailing but insufficient econ omic doctrine has begun. Among the candidates to be screened, Schumpeterian economics takes a prominent place.
