Taxation and household saving: reflections on the OECD report

At the beginning of the 1990s, there was a wave of interest in the connections between taxation and saving, culminating in a series of reports and reviews in 1994. So, for example, UK tax policy towards saving and investment has been reviewed in the context of the Industrial Finance Initiative; Finance Ministers had an extensive discussion at the IMF meeting in Madrid; under the German presidency of the EU, work has continued on a possible common basis for taxing savings, as initiated by Belgium last year; the IFS Capital Taxes Group concluded its deliberations with Proposals for the Taxation of Savings and Profits; and in the August issue of Fiscal Studies, Boadway and Wildasin surveyed much of the literature from the 1980s. Then in November the OECD published an extensive survey on Taxation and Household Saving in each of its 24 Member countries in 1993, together with an analysis of what lessons might be learned for good design of tax policy from the literature and country experiences. This article summarises the report and considers what might be deduced from its conclusions.