Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, England changed its system of raising revenues from tax farming, combined with the granting of monopolies, to direct collection within the government administration. Rents were then transferred from tax farmers and monopolists to the central government such that English public finances improved dramatically compared to both the old system and to its major competitor, France. We offer a theory explaining this development. In our view, a cost of tax farming is the ex-ante inefficiency due to the auction mechanism while a cost of direct collection is the ex-post monitoring cost the government incurs to prevent theft. When the monitoring cost is high the government therefore allows tax farmers to extract large rents to enhance their up-front payments. In addition, because revenues materialize late under direct collection, and since the government faces limited borrowing, a high default risk makes a system of up-front collection attractive. The results of the model are consistent with historical facts from England and France.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by CESifo GmbH in its series CESifo Working Paper Series with number
CESifo Working Paper No. 1464.
Length: Date of creation: 2005 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1464
Contact details of provider: Postal: Poschingerstrasse 5, 81679 Munich Phone: +49 (89) 9224-0 Fax: +49 (89) 985369 Web page: http://www.cesifo.de
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Julio Saavedra).
Related research
Keywords:
Find related papers by JEL classification: H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government N43 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, and Regulation - - - Europe: Pre-1913
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: