Can rationing increase welfare? Theory and an application to India’s Ration Shop System

In many developing countries, households can purchase limited quantities of goods at a fixed subsidized price through ration shops. This paper asks whether the characteristics of developing countries explain why governments use such systems. I find an equity-efficiency trade-off: an efficiency-maximizing government will never use ration shops, but a welfare-maximizing one might to redistribute and provide insurance. Welfare gains of ration shops will be highest for necessity goods and goods with high price risk. I calibrate the model for India and find that ration shops are welfare improving for three of the four goods sold through the system today

Tax me, but spend wisely? Sources of public finance and government accountability

Existing evidence suggests that extra grant revenues lead to little improvements in public services in developing countries - but would governments spend tax revenues differently? This paper considers a program that invests in the tax capacity of Brazilian municipalities. Using variations in the timing of program uptake I find that it raises local tax revenues and that the increase in taxes is used to improve both the quantity and quality of municipal education infrastructure. In contrast increases in grants over which municipalities have the same discretion as over taxes have no impact on any measure of local public infrastructure. These results suggest that the way governments are financed matters: governments spend increases in tax revenues more towards expenditures that benefit citizens than increases in grant revenues

The Fiscal Cost of Trade Liberalization

This paper puts the recent evolution of tax revenues in developing countries in historical perspective. Using a novel dataset on total and trade tax revenues we compare the fiscal cost of trade liberalization in developing countries and in today's rich countries at earlier stages of development. We find that trade liberalization episodes led to larger and longer-lived decreases in total tax revenues in developing countries since the 1970s than in rich countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The fall in total tax revenues lasts more than ten years in half the developing countries in our sample

Tax revenues, development, and the fiscal cost of trade liberalization, 1792-2006

This paper documents the fiscal cost of trade liberalization: the extent to which countries are able to recover the trade tax revenues lost from liberalizing trade by increasing tax revenues from other sources. Using a novel dataset on government revenues over the period 1792-2006 we compare the fiscal impact of trade liberalization in developing countries and in today’s rich countries at earlier stages of development. We find that trade liberalization episodes led to larger and longer-lived decreases in total tax revenues in developing countries since the 1970s than in rich countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Half the developing countries in our sample experience a fall in total tax revenues that lasts more than ten years after an episode. Results are similar when we consider government expenditures, suggesting decreases in trade tax revenues negatively affect governments’ capacity to provide public services in many developing countries

Inégalités et prélèvements obligatoires en France : l'apport d'une méthode de microsimulation avec bootstrap

This article offers a new approach of the microsimulation analysis of fiscal systems. Using a model which enables us to include four major French taxes (the VAT, payroll taxes, income tax and the CSG, a tax on all types of income) and the bootstrap technique, we compare the redistributive impact of an increase in fiscal revenue for different fiscal instruments. The well known results of the microsimulation literature on French fiscal reforms are confirmed: most notably the strongly redistributive impact of the income tax and the regressive one of the VAT. Our methodological contribution consists in the construction of confidence intervals for the semi-elasticities of Gini coefficients to the use of each tax.Cet article propose une extension originale de l'analyse par microsimulation des systèmes socio-fiscaux. Sur la base d'un modèle permettant d'intégrer dans un même cadre quatre prélèvements (TVA, cotisations sociales, CSG et impôt sur le revenu) et de techniques statistiques de bootstrap, on analyse les différents effets redistributifs d'un surplus de recette publique selon l'outil fiscal utilisé. Les résultats obtenus confirment le caractère fortement redistributif de l'impôt sur le revenu et la nature anti-redistributive de la TVA. L'apport consécutif à l'utilisation de techniques de bootsrap consiste alors principalement à fournir des intervalles de confiance au résultat synthétiques que constitue l'estimation des semi-elasticités de chaque prélèvement au coefficient de Gini

How to reorganise the world health organization – and how to finance it

Three conditions must be met for the WHO to reinvent itself and prevent and contain future pandemics, write Lucie Gadenne and Maitreesh Ghata

Inégalités et prélèvements obligatoires en France : l'apport d'une méthode de microsimulation avec bootstrap

Cet article propose une extension originale de l'analyse par microsimulation des systèmes socio-fiscaux. Sur la base d'un modèle permettant d'intégrer dans un même cadre quatre prélèvements (TVA, cotisations sociales, CSG et impôt sur le revenu) et de techniques statistiques de bootstrap, on analyse les différents effets redistributifs d'un surplus de recette publique selon l'outil fiscal utilisé. Les résultats obtenus confirment le caractère fortement redistributif de l'impôt sur le revenu et la nature anti-redistributive de la TVA. L'apport consécutif à l'utilisation de techniques de bootsrap consiste alors principalement à fournir des intervalles de confiance au résultat synthétiques que constitue l'estimation des semi-elasticités de chaque prélèvement au coefficient de Gini.Microsimulation; Prélèvements; Inégalités

Do ration shop systems increase welfare? Theory and an application to India

In many developing countries households can purchase limited quantities of goods at a fixed subsidized price through ration shops. This paper asks whether these countries' characteristics justify the use of such ration shop systems. I find an equity-efficiency trade-off: an efficiencymaximizing government will never use ration shops but a welfare-maximizing one might, to redistribute and provide insurance. Welfare gains from introducing ration shops are highest for necessity goods with high price risk. I calibrate the model for India and find that ration shops are indeed welfare-improving for three of the four goods sold through the system today

Informality, consumption taxes and redistribution

Can consumption taxes reduce inequality in developing countries? We combine household expenditure data from 31 countries with theory to shed new light on the redistributive potential and optimal design of consumption taxes. We use the type of store in which purchases occur to proxy for informal (untaxed) consumption. This enables us to characterize the informality Engel curve: we find that the budget share spent in the informal sector steeply declines with income, in all countries. The informal sector thus makes consumption taxes progressive: households in the richest quintile face an effective tax rate that is twice that of the poorest quintile. We extend the standard optimal commodity tax model to allow for informal consumption and calibrate it to the data to study the effects of different tax policies on inequality. Contrary to consensus, we show that consumption taxes are redistributive, lowering inequality by as much as personal income taxes. Once informality is taken into account, commonly used redistributive policies, such as reduced tax rates on necessities, have a limited impact on inequality. In particular, subsidizing food cannot be justified on equity or efficiency grounds in several poor countries

Taxation and Supplier Networks: Evidence from India

Do tax systems distort firm-to-firm trade? This paper considers the effect of tax policy on supplier networks in a large developing economy, the state of West Bengal in India. Using administrative panel data on firms, including transaction data for 4.8 million supplier-client pairs, we first document substantial segmentation of supply chains between firms paying Value-Added Taxes (VAT) and non-VAT-paying firms. We then develop a model of firms’ sourcing and tax decisions within supply chains to understand the mechanisms through which tax policy interacts with supply networks. The model predicts partial segmentation in equilibrium because of both supply-chain distortions (taxes affect how much firms trade with each other) and strategic complementarities in firms’ tax choices. Finally, we test the model’s predictions using variations over time within-firm and within supplier-client pairs. We find that the tax system distorts firms’ sourcing decisions, and suggestive evidence of strategic complementarities in firms’ tax choices within supplier networks