IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedbpp/04-4.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Massachusetts business taxes: unfair? inadequate? uncompetitive?

Author

Listed:
  • Robert Tannenwald

Abstract

In debating Massachusetts business tax policy, protagonists have cited many different indicators purporting to assess the fairness, adequacy, and competitiveness of the Commonwealth?s business taxes. These statistics actually reveal very little about the degree to which Massachusetts business taxes achieve these widely accepted tax policy goals. The author explains why these indicators are misleading and presents new indicators of business tax competitiveness that, although imperfect, are more accurate than those most widely quoted. The article concludes that the fairness of Massachusetts business taxes is unclear and that the Commonwealth?s corporate income taxes are inadequate. The clearest conclusion drawn is that Massachusetts business taxes do not harm its competitive standing.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert Tannenwald, 2004. "Massachusetts business taxes: unfair? inadequate? uncompetitive?," Public Policy Discussion Paper 04-4, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedbpp:04-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/ppdp/2004/ppdp0404.htm
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/ppdp/2004/ppdp0404.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bruce, Donald & Fox, William F., 2000. "E-Commerce in the Context of Declining State Sales Tax Bases," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 53(n. 4), pages 1373-90, December.
    2. Bruce, Donald & Fox, William F., 2000. "E-Commerce in the Context of Declining State Sales Tax Bases," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 53(4), pages 1373-1390, December.
    3. Robert Tannenwald, 1996. "State business tax climate: how should it be measured and how important is it?," New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, issue Jan, pages 23-38.
    4. Robert Tannenwald, 1994. "Massachusetts' tax competitiveness," New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, issue Jan, pages 31-49.
    5. Alicia H. Munnell, 1990. "How does public infrastructure affect regional economic performance?," Conference Series ; [Proceedings], Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, vol. 34, pages 69-112.
    6. Richard A. Musgrave & Karl E. Case & Herman Leonard, 1974. "The Distribution of Fiscal Burdens and Benefits," Public Finance Review, , vol. 2(3), pages 259-311, July.
    7. William H. Oakland & William A. Testa, 1998. "Can the benefits principle be applied to state-local taxation of business?," Working Paper Series WP-98-16, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    8. Fox, William F. & Luna, LeAnn, 2002. "State Corporate Tax Revenue Trends: Causes and Possible Solutions," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 55(3), pages 491-508, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Robert Tannenwald & Nick Turner, 2004. "Interstate fiscal disparity in state fiscal year 1999," Public Policy Discussion Paper 04-9, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

    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. Donald Bruce & William Fox & Matthew Murray, 2003. "To Tax Or Not To Tax? The Case Of Electronic Commerce," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 21(1), pages 25-40, January.
    2. Propheter Geoffrey, 2015. "Political Institutions and State Sales Tax Base Erosion," Statistics, Politics and Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 6(1-2), pages 1-17, December.
    3. David R. Agrawal & Aline Bütikofer, 2022. "Public finance in the era of the COVID-19 crisis," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 29(6), pages 1349-1372, December.
    4. Horacio L. P. Piffano, 2007. "Argentina and Brazil: Fiscal Harmonization and Subnational Sales Taxation – State / Provincial VAT versus State / Provincial Retail Sales Tax," Department of Economics, Working Papers 069, Departamento de Economía, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Universidad Nacional de La Plata.
    5. Beem, Richard & Bruce, Donald, 2021. "Failure to launch: Measuring the impact of sales tax nexus standards on business activity," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 201(C).
    6. David Hanrahan, 2021. "Digitalization as a Determinant of Tax Revenues in OECD Countries: A Static and Dynamic Panel Data Analysis," Athens Journal of Business & Economics, Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER), vol. 7(4), pages 321-348, October.
    7. Andrew F. Haughwout & Benjamin Hyman & Or Shachar, 2022. "The Municipal Liquidity Facility," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 28(1), July.
    8. Michael Wasylenko, 1997. "Taxation and economic development: the state of the economic literature," New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, issue Mar, pages 37-52.
    9. Bruno Albuquerque & Georgi Krustev, 2018. "Debt Overhang and Deleveraging in the US Household Sector: Gauging the Impact on Consumption," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 64(2), pages 459-481, June.
    10. William F. Fox & Matthew N. Murray, 2005. "Sales Taxation in a Global Economy," Contributions to Economic Analysis, in: Taxing the Hard-to-tax: Lessons from Theory and Practice, pages 221-244, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    11. Agrawal, David R. & Shybalkina, Iuliia, 2023. "Online shopping can redistribute local tax revenue from urban to rural America," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 219(C).
    12. Robert Tannenwald, 2001. "Are state and local revenue systems becoming obsolete?," New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, pages 27-43.
    13. Yoshimi Adachi & Hikaru Ogawa, 2022. "Cross-Border Shopping, E-Commerce, and Consumption Tax Revenues in Japan," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-1204, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
    14. Donald Bruce & John Deskins, 2012. "Can state tax policies be used to promote entrepreneurial activity?," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 38(4), pages 375-397, May.
    15. Argilés-Bosch, Josep M. & Somoza, Antonio & Ravenda, Diego & García-Blandón, Josep, 2020. "An empirical examination of the influence of e-commerce on tax avoidance in Europe," Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, Elsevier, vol. 41(C).
    16. Tessa Conroy & Harvey Cutler & Stephan Weiler, 2016. "The State-Level Impacts of Enforcing Sales Taxes for E-retail Purchases," Growth and Change, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(2), pages 276-295, June.
    17. Richard Hawkins & Matthew N. Murray, 2004. "Explaining Interjurisdictional Variations in Local Sales Tax Yield," Public Finance Review, , vol. 32(1), pages 82-104, January.
    18. Richard Green & Kerry Vandell, "undated". "The Impact of Technology on the Internet on Commercial Real Estate," Wisconsin-Madison CULER working papers 01-11, University of Wisconsin Center for Urban Land Economic Research.
    19. Brian E. Whitacre, 2011. "Do higher broadband adoption rates mean lower tax collections from local retail sales? Implications of e-commerce in rural areas of the US," Regional Science Policy & Practice, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 3(2), pages 71-85, June.
    20. Mr. Michael Keen, 2002. "Some International Issues in Commodity Taxation," IMF Working Papers 2002/124, International Monetary Fund.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Business tax - Massachusetts;

    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:fip:fedbpp:04-4. 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: Catherine Spozio (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbbous.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.