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We map trends of tax policy change in developing countries and transition economies since the 1980s, compare them to tax trends in the advanced Western democracies and review some of the explanations offered by the contributions to this volume. We find that non-Western countries follow the lead of Western countries in some important respects but not in others. While non-Western countries brought their general revenues closer to Western levels and copied important features of Western consumption taxation including higher value added tax revenues and lower revenues from trade taxation, they failed to emulate the hallmark of 20th-century Western taxation: a strong and progressive personal income tax. The taxation trends are closely associated with socio-economic changes (as summarized by GDP per capita) and structural factors (as summarized by country size). Yet the impact of political institutions on taxation is non-linear and complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the common assumption that the European Union (EU) has little power over taxation. Based on a comprehensive analysis of EU tax legislation and European Court of Justice (ECJ) tax jurisprudence from 1958 to 2007, the article shows that the EU exerts considerable regulatory control over the Member States' taxing power and imposes tighter constraints on Member State taxes than the American federal government imposes on American state taxation. These findings contradict the standard account of the EU as a regulatory polity that specialises in apolitical issues of market creation and leaves control of highly politicised core functions of government (defence, taxation, social security, education, etc.) to the Member States; despite strong treaty safeguards, national tax autonomy is undermined by EU regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does the principle of mutual recognition apply to product regulation but not to product taxation, i.e. to value added tax (VAT)? It is not for lack of trying. The Commission called for mutual recognition of VAT long before the European Court of Justice 'invented' it for product regulation, and the thrust of much of the EU's VAT policy was to implement this principle. I argue that three factors explain the failure of this policy and the comparative success of mutual recognition of product regulation. First, it is economically less beneficial to apply mutual recognition to turnover taxation than to product regulation. Second, it is politically more demanding. Third, in contrast to product regulation, there is no judicial pressure towards mutual recognition of VAT. A review of these factors helps to understand not only the specific problems of mutual recognition of VAT but also the general problems of tax integration in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are basically three stories about the globalization-welfare state nexus. The first story argues that globalization is the cause of the chronic crisis of the welfare state. As national economies open to the international market, governments are forced w adapt to the imperatives of global competition, and this means cutting cost-intensive welfare programmes (globalization theory). The second story argues that, whatever the cause of the welfare state crisis, globalization is not part or it. There is neither theoretical reason nor empirical evidence to believe that national policy autonomy has decreased owing to increasing economic interdependencies (globalization sceptics). The third story holds that globalization, far from causing the welfare states troubles, is a consequence of these troubles, and part of their solution (revisionism). The paper reviews each of these stories, and counterposes them to simple descriptive statistics on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does globalization undermine the fiscal basis of the welfare state? Some observers are not convinced. They claim that aggregate data on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries show no drop in tax levels and conclude from this that tax competition is not a serious challenge for the welfare state. This conclusion is unwarranted. The article shows that tax competition systematically constrains national tax autonomy in a serious way. It prevents governments from raising taxes in response to rising spending requirements and from detaxing labor in response to growing unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the tax competition in the European Union. Association of tax competition and economic integration; Development of a simple model of tax competition that allows to generate a number of testable implications; List of withholding taxes on nonresident and resident income.