IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/adb/adbwps/2476.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Working Paper 350 - Taming Private Leviathans: Regulation versus Taxation

Author

Abstract

This paper explores the interplay between concentration of wealth and policies, namely regulation and taxation. The paper exploits variation in exposure to international commodity prices. Using a global panel data set of the net worth of billionaires, the results point to a positive relationship between commodity prices and the concentration of wealth at the top. Regulation especially pertaining to competition is found to limit the effects of commodity price shocks on the concentration of wealth, while taxation has little effect. Moreover, commodity price shocks crowd out non-resource tax revenue, hence limiting the scope for income transfers and redistribution. The results are consistent with the primacy of ex ante interventions over ex post ones for addressing wealth inequality.

Suggested Citation

  • Rabah Arezki & Asif Islam & Grégoire Rota-Graziosi, 2021. "Working Paper 350 - Taming Private Leviathans: Regulation versus Taxation," Working Paper Series 2476, African Development Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:adb:adbwps:2476
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.afdb.org/sites/default/files/documents/publications/wps_no_350_taming_private_leviathans_regulation_verus_taxation_2_.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Robinson, James A. & Torvik, Ragnar & Verdier, Thierry, 2017. "The political economy of public income volatility: With an application to the resource curse," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 243-252.
    2. Rabah Arezki & Thorvaldur Gylfason, 2013. "Resource Rents, Democracy, Corruption and Conflict: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 22(4), pages 552-569, August.
    3. Rota-Graziosi, Grégoire, 2019. "The supermodularity of the tax competition game," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 25-35.
    4. Borge, Lars-Erik & Parmer, Pernille & Torvik, Ragnar, 2015. "Local natural resource curse?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 131(C), pages 101-114.
    5. Alstadsæter, Annette & Johannesen, Niels & Zucman, Gabriel, 2018. "Who owns the wealth in tax havens? Macro evidence and implications for global inequality," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 162(C), pages 89-100.
    6. Halvor Mehlum & Karl Moene & Ragnar Torvik, 2006. "Institutions and the Resource Curse," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 116(508), pages 1-20, January.
    7. Abhijit Banerjee & Thomas Piketty, 2005. "Top Indian Incomes, 1922-2000," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 19(1), pages 1-20.
    8. Anthony B. Atkinson & Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2011. "Top Incomes in the Long Run of History," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(1), pages 3-71, March.
    9. Alesina, Alberto & Perotti, Roberto, 1996. "Income distribution, political instability, and investment," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 40(6), pages 1203-1228, June.
    10. Jonathan Isham & Michael Woolcock & Lant Pritchett & Gwen Busby, 2005. "The Varieties of Resource Experience: Natural Resource Export Structures and the Political Economy of Economic Growth," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 19(2), pages 141-174.
    11. Lydia Assouad & Lucas Chancel & Marc Morgan, 2018. "Extreme Inequality: Evidence from Brazil, India, the Middle East, and South Africa," AEA Papers and Proceedings, American Economic Association, vol. 108, pages 119-123, May.
    12. Leigh, Andrew & van der Eng, Pierre, 2009. "Inequality in Indonesia: What can we learn from top incomes?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(1-2), pages 209-212, February.
    13. Prichard, Wilson & Cobham, Alex & Goodall, Andrew, 2014. "The ICTD Government Revenue Dataset," Working Papers 10250, Institute of Development Studies, International Centre for Tax and Development.
    14. Marc Fleurbaey & Vito Peragine, 2013. "Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Equality of Opportunity," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 80(317), pages 118-130, January.
    15. Caroline Freund & Sarah Oliver, 2016. "Rich People Poor Countries: The Rise of Emerging-Market Tycoons and their Mega Firms," Peterson Institute Press: All Books, Peterson Institute for International Economics, number 7038, October.
    16. repec:oup:jafrec:v:22:y:2013:i:4:p:-569 is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Ramón E. López & Eugenio Figueroa B. & Pablo Gutiérrez C., 2016. "Fundamental accrued capital gains and the measurement of top incomes: an application to Chile," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 14(4), pages 379-394, December.
    18. Ma, Lin & Ruzic, Dimitrije, 2020. "Globalization and top income shares," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 125(C).
    19. Alexander James, 2015. "US State Fiscal Policy and Natural Resources," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 7(3), pages 238-257, August.
    20. Josh Bivens & Lawrence Mishel, 2013. "The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals as Evidence of Rents in Top 1 Percent Incomes," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 27(3), pages 57-78, Summer.
    21. Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2003. "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(1), pages 1-41.
    22. Klomp, Jeroen & de Haan, Jakob, 2016. "Election cycles in natural resource rents: Empirical evidence," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 121(C), pages 79-93.
    23. Jørgen Juel Andersen & Niels Johannesen & David Dreyer Lassen & Elena Paltseva, 2017. "Petro Rents, Political Institutions, and Hidden Wealth: Evidence from Offshore Bank Accounts," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 15(4), pages 818-860.
    24. Bertrand Gruss & Suhaib Kebhaj, 2019. "Commodity Terms of Trade: A New Database," IMF Working Papers 2019/021, International Monetary Fund.
    25. Thomas Piketty, 2003. "Income Inequality in France, 1901-1998," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 111(5), pages 1004-1042, October.
    26. Klass, Oren S. & Biham, Ofer & Levy, Moshe & Malcai, Ofer & Solomon, Sorin, 2006. "The Forbes 400 and the Pareto wealth distribution," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 90(2), pages 290-295, February.
    27. Tino Sanandaji, 2014. "The international mobility of billionaires," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 42(2), pages 329-338, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Grégoire Rota-Graziosi & Islam Asif & Rabah Arezki, 2021. "Taming Private Leviathans : Regulation versus Taxation," Working Papers hal-03129746, HAL.
    2. Tania Masi & Antonio Savoia & Kunal Sen, 2018. "Is there a fiscal resource curse? Resource rents, fiscal capacity and political institutions," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series esid-096-18, GDI, The University of Manchester.
    3. Frank A. Cowell & Philippe Kerm, 2015. "Wealth Inequality: A Survey," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(4), pages 671-710, September.
    4. Diego Winkelried & Bruno Escobar, 2022. "Declining inequality in Latin America? Robustness checks for Peru," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 20(1), pages 223-243, March.
    5. Anthony B. Atkinson & Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2011. "Top Incomes in the Long Run of History," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(1), pages 3-71, March.
    6. Sambit Bhattacharyya & Jeffrey Williamson, 2013. "Distributional Impact of Commodity Price Shocks: Australia over a Century," CEH Discussion Papers 019, Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    7. Oliver Denk, 2015. "Who are the top 1% earners in Europe?," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 1274, OECD Publishing.
    8. Bhattacharyya, Sambit & Resosudarmo, Budy P., 2015. "Growth, Growth Accelerations, and the Poor: Lessons from Indonesia," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 154-165.
    9. Blotevogel, Robert & Imamoglu, Eslem & Moriyama, Kenji & Sarr, Babacar, 2022. "Income inequality measures and economic growth channels," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    10. Assouad, Lydia, 2023. "Rethinking the Lebanese economic miracle: The extreme concentration of income and wealth in Lebanon, 2005–2014," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 161(C).
    11. Tania Masi & Antonio Savoia & Kunal Sen, 2020. "Is there a fiscal resource curse? Resource rents, fiscal capacity, and political institutions in developing economies," WIDER Working Paper Series wp2020-10, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    12. Andrew Leigh, 2007. "How Closely Do Top Income Shares Track Other Measures of Inequality?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 117(524), pages 619-633, November.
    13. Ma, Lin & Ruzic, Dimitrije, 2020. "Globalization and top income shares," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 125(C).
    14. Andrés César & Guillermo Falcone & Pablo Garriga, 2022. "Robots, Exports and Top Income Inequality: Evidence for the U.S," CEDLAS, Working Papers 0307, CEDLAS, Universidad Nacional de La Plata.
    15. Milanovic, Branko, 2013. "The return of “patrimonial capitalism”: review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st century," MPRA Paper 52384, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Atkinson, Tony & Leigh, Andrew, 2010. "The Distribution of Top Incomes in Five Anglo-Saxon Countries over the Twentieth Century," IZA Discussion Papers 4937, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    17. Badeeb, Ramez Abubakr & Lean, Hooi Hooi & Clark, Jeremy, 2017. "The evolution of the natural resource curse thesis: A critical literature survey," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 123-134.
    18. Emmanuel Saez, 2017. "Income And Wealth Inequality: Evidence And Policy Implications," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 35(1), pages 7-25, January.
    19. Advani, Arun & Koenig, Felix & Pessina, Lorenzo & Summers, Andy, 2020. "Importing Inequality: Immigration and the Top 1 Percent," IZA Discussion Papers 13731, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Inequality; Wealth concentration; Competition; Tax; Natural Resources; Development JEL classification: D31; D63; H26; H20; O13;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion and Avoidance
    • H20 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - General
    • O13 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Environment; Other Primary Products

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:adb:adbwps:2476. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Adeleke Oluwole Salami (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/afdbgci.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.