IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/48.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do taxes matter? A review of the effect of taxation on economic behavior and output

Author

Listed:
  • Skinner, Jonathan

Abstract

Economists have stressed that the efficiency costs of taxation are not the obvious costs to taxpayers of handing over payments to the government. Instead, the efficiency costs stem from the efforts of taxpayers to avoid paying money to the government, whether it is consuming less of the taxed good, producing less of the taxed good, smuggling, or just evading taxes. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate with historical examples the efficiency costs of taxation. Each type of tax (labor, capital, property) is shown to have particular disincentive effects, which, if the tax rates are sufficiently high, could be dramatic. The report concludes that the efficiency cost of taxation is often difficult to detect, and often takes a back seat to political considerations in tax policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Skinner, Jonathan, 1989. "Do taxes matter? A review of the effect of taxation on economic behavior and output," Policy Research Working Paper Series 48, The World Bank.
  • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:48
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/1989/08/01/000009265_3960928054051/Rendered/PDF/multi_page.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Richardson Kojo Edeme & Chigozie Nelson Nkalu & Benedict Azu & Sylvernus Chinedu Nwachukwu, 2016. "Alternative Specification and Estimation of Tax Revenue-Gross Domestic Product Relationship," Asian Journal of Economic Modelling, Asian Economic and Social Society, vol. 4(3), pages 134-141, September.

    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:wbk:wbrwps:48. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.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.