A note on the taxation of capital income in the Czech Republic and Poland

The transition of the eastern European countries into market-based economies and their potential integration into the European Union raise questions about how their capital income tax systems should be structured and to what extent they are in line with the rest of Europe. This note presents a brief analysis of the tax systems currently in place and considers what issues should be of concern in setting tax policy in the future. The impact capital income taxes have on the incentives for firms to invest in the Czech Republic and Poland is described using a marginal effective tax wedge and an average effective tax rate. Simulations of some simple reforms are also presented. First, some brief comments are made on what the optimal tax policy for smaller capital-importing countries might be and how this should inform policy in the transition economies. The standard theoretical literature on optimal taxation in a small open economy suggests that residence-based taxation is optimal, implying that the tax

What has been the tax competition experience of the past 20 years?

This paper describes tax reforms in OECD countries over the last 20 years and how they are related to tax competition. Both individual countries' reforms and multilateral initiatives and developments are covered. This is followed by an overview of the empirical evidence on tax competition. Our conclusion is that the evidence for some interdependence in tax setting behaviour is strong, although the exact process driving this remains unclear. While the most basic tax competition models fail to explain the development in OECD countries, there is more than one possible explanation for the reforms undertaken if more advanced models are considered. The multilateral initiatives that were implemented however do not seem to be related to resource-based tax competition, instead they are about taxing rights.Corporation tax

Estimating households' willingness to pay

The recent literature has brought together the characteristics model of utility and classic revealed preference arguments to learn about consumers' willingness to pay. We incorporate market pricing equilibrium conditions into this setting. This allows us to use observed purchase prices and quantities on a large basket of products to learn about individual household's willingness to pay for characteristics, while maintaining a high degree of flexibility and also avoiding the biases that arise from inappropriate aggregation. We illustrate the approach using scanner data on food purchases to estimate bounds on willingness to pay for the organic characteristic. We combine these estimates with information on households' stated preferences and beliefs to show that on average quality is the most important factor affecting bounds on household willingness to pay for organic, with health concerns coming second, and environmental concerns lagging far behind.

The taxation of discrete investment choices

Traditional analysis of the taxation of income from capital has focused on the impact of tax on marginal investment decisions; the principal impact of tax on investment is through the cost of capital, and is generally measured by an effective marginal tax rate. In this paper, we consider cases in which investors face a choice between two or more mutually exclusive projects, both of which are expected to earn at least the minimum required rate of return. Examples include the location decisions of multinationals, firms’ choice of technology, and the choice of investment projects in the presence of binding financial constraints. In these cases the choice depends on the effective average tax rate. We propose a measure of this rate and demonstrate its relationship to the conventional effective marginal tax rate. Estimates of both are presented and compared for domestic and international investment in Germany, Japan, the UK and USA between 1979 and 1997.

Household willingness to pay for organic products

We use hedonic prices and purchase quantities to consider what can be learned about household willingness to pay for baskets of organic products and how this varies across households. We use rich scanner data on food purchases by a large number of households to compute household specific lower and upper bounds on willingness to pay for various baskets of organic products. These bounds provide information about willingness to pay for organic without imposing restrictive assumptions on preferences. We show that the reasons households are willing to pay vary, with quality being the most important, health concerns coming second, and environmental concerns lagging far behind. We also show how these methods can be used for example by stores to provide robust upper bounds on the revenue implication of introducing a new line of organic products.

The link between product market reform and macro-economic performance

Value-added per capita in EU countries has lagged behind the US. This is despite widespread reforms to product markets across EU countries aimed at increasing growth. This study analyses the macro-economic impact of product market reforms undertaken in the European Union over the 1980s and 1990s by examining a large number of regulations and reforms across EU countries.product market, product market reforms, regulations, macro-economic performance, allocative efficiency, productive efficiency, dynamic efficiency, aggregate economy, Griffith, Harisson

Characteristics of foreign-owned firms in British manufacturing

This paper describes the characteristics of manufacturing establishments in Britain over the period 1980 to 1996. Particular attention is paid to differences between plants of different ownership nationality. The findings suggest that establishments that are always foreign-owned have significantly higher labour productivity than those that remain under domestic ownership. In addition, labour productivity improves faster over time and faster with age in foreign-owned establishments. The difference in labour productivity is matched by an equivalent difference in levels of investment per employee. Establishments that change ownership nationality do not seem to experience very large changes in labour productivity levels. The proportion of skilled workers in the workplace, and wages for both skilled and operative workers are higher in foreign-owned establishments than domestic-owned, in line with differences in labour productivity.foreign direct investment, productivity, multinational firms

Retail productivity

Recent attention has focused on the UK's productivity gap in the retail sector. Figure 1 shows an estimate of labour productivity in retail across countries, using output per hour worked. The UK lies well behind the US, France and Germany. Reynolds at al (2005) contribute to this debate by providing a discussion of the literature, along side interviews with several UK and US retail firms. The conclusions of their paper are that, while there are many measurement issues, most of the evidence points to the fact that, on average, productivity in this sector in the UK is low and has grown slowly over recent years when compared to the US. They rightly point out that a more thorough understanding of what drives productivity in the retail sector requires a better understanding of the 'complex mix of urban characteristics, consumer preferences and competitive rivalries'. In this article we discuss some of the main issues involved in the measurement of productivity in retail, how these problems can be tackled, and we consider the interpretation of these statistics. We then discuss new work using microdata on the UK supermarket industry and conclude with a short discussion of where future research needs to look to answer the important policy questions around why the UK's productivity performance remains low in this important sector.