Reflections on the Tax Working Group Report
This article reviews the Report of the Tax Working Group of the Victoria University of Wellington, which included individuals from the Treasury and the Inland Revenue Department, as well as from the business community. The Report makes an important contribution to the tax policy debate in New Zealand by setting out the reasons for reform, the basic principles used to consider alternative policies, and the advantages and disadvantages of a range of reform proposals. The purpose of this review of the Report is not to discuss the proposals and recommendations in detail, but to consider a number of aspects concerning the evaluation of tax structures and to try to clarify some arguments which are not stated explicitly in the Report. An indication of useful next steps is also given.
The Excess Burden of Taxation
No abstract available.
The Measurement of Household Welfare
The measurement of household welfare is one of the most compelling yet demanding areas in economics. To place the analysis of inequality and poverty within an economic framework where individuals are making decisions about current and lifetime incomes and expenditures is a difficult task, made all the more challenging by the complexity of the decision-making process in which households are involved and the variety of constraints they face. This 1994 book examines the conceptual and practical difficulties of making inferences from observed behaviour. It addresses the problems of making comparisons across a range of very different households and discusses how data for such comparisons should be collected. The contributions, from experts from Europe, North America and Australia, have the unifying theme that there is a strong relationship between theoretical concepts from microeconomics and the appropriate use of micro data in evaluating household welfare.