IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cpp/issued/v17y1991i3p351-367.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Politics of Wealth Taxes

Author

Listed:
  • Keith G. Banting

Abstract

While nineteenth-century conservatives feared that the advent of democratic government would lead to a major redistribution of wealth, democracy has proven relatively gentle with the wealthy. This paper analyzes the politics of wealth taxes, drawing on the rights of both the public choice tradition and comparative studies of the politics of redistribution. Net wealth taxes, which exist in approximately half of the OECD nations, are found to be highly dependent on the strength of left political forces; and although wealth transfer taxes exist in most OECD nations, their abolition or erosion in several countries suggests a narrowing of their political base. The paper concludes that a political constituency in favor of increased reliance on wealth taxes in Canada cannot be taken for granted.

Suggested Citation

  • Keith G. Banting, 1991. "The Politics of Wealth Taxes," Canadian Public Policy, University of Toronto Press, vol. 17(3), pages 351-367, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:cpp:issued:v:17:y:1991:i:3:p:351-367
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0317-0861%28199109%2917%3A3%3C351%3ATPOWT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N
    Download Restriction: only available to JSTOR subscribers
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. La riqueza debería tributar más
      by Santiago Lago Peñas in Res Publica on 2012-08-21 21:08:03

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Nick O'Donovan, 2021. "One‐off wealth taxes: theory and evidence," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 42(3-4), pages 565-597, September.
    2. Schnellenbach, Jan, 2012. "The economics of taxing net wealth: A survey of the issues," Freiburg Discussion Papers on Constitutional Economics 12/5, Walter Eucken Institut e.V..
    3. Sarah Perret, 2021. "Why were most wealth taxes abandoned and is this time different?," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 42(3-4), pages 539-563, September.

    More about this item

    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:cpp:issued:v:17:y:1991:i:3:p:351-367. 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: Iver Chong (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.utpjournals.press/loi/cpp .

    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.