Fiscal Sociology Research Articles

Natural resources, rent dependence, and public goods provision in China: evidence from Shanxi’s county-level governments

This paper investigates how natural-resource endowments affect the provision of local public goods in China. According to fiscal sociology, due to the rentier effect, resource-rich local governments tend to have more state autonomy and are less responsive to society, resulting in poor governance. Moreover, due to political myopia, resource-abundant local governments tend to neglect the accumulation of human capital. Shanxi’s county-level governments are excellent samples to test these hypotheses. Statistical results show that resource-abundant local governments tend to spend less on social expenditures as well as specific education, social security and healthcare, and environmental protection expenditures. Meanwhile, coal-rich governments spend significantly more on self-serving administrative expenditures. The results suggest that negative impacts of natural resources on governmental fiscal extraction and expenditure behaviors are an important causal mechanism of the resource-curse hypothesis. To curb this problem, the current fiscal system needs to be reformed accordingly.

Taxation and state-building: The tax reform under the Nationalist Government in China, 1928–1949

Using primary sources and drawing on insights from the new accounting history and the new fiscal sociology, this paper examines the tax reform launched by the Nationalist Government in China during 1928–1949 as a case study to enrich an understanding of the relationship between taxation and state building. Among other things, the paper reveals a shift from the traditional Confucian ideology of “low taxes” to the Western-derived ideology of “good taxes,” used by the state to justify new taxes. It discusses how the Chinese Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War differently affected the Nationalist Government's political legitimacy and state finance and taxation. It analyzes how tax compliance was pursued by the Nationalist Government through state-society negotiations and compromises over taxation, in the absence of representative political institutions, as well as coercive enforcement of tax laws and regulations–the two approaches together actualized and delimited the new tax regime and the growing state power (legitimacy and capacity). These history/culture-specific features may be understood as variations to a general historical pattern of taxation and state building based on European-American experiences.

The Political Economy of Social Insurance: Towards a Fiscal‐Centred Framework

AbstractThis article draws attention to social insurance (SI) as a revenue raising institution, and explores the potential merits of drawing on new fiscal sociology for studying the development of SI systems. This is done by revisiting previous research conducted in Germany, the USA, Finland and Israel and by offering a new reading of their findings. The reviewed cases support two interlocking claims drawn from new fiscal sociology to the study of SI. The first is that state actors may perceive SI as an extraction instrument and employ it to advance fiscal and/or economic interests other than covering the costs of SI schemes. The second is that the design and management of contribution policies for such purposes may have substantial ramifications for the development of SI schemes. In addition, while current understandings tend to associate fiscal concerns with welfare state retrenchment, this article shows that they can also play a major role in driving welfare state expansion.

К вопросу о налоговой культуре российского общества

The author investigates a concept of tax culture within such school of sciences as “fiscal sociology”. The tax culture is a complex, multilevel structure; it acts as a component of the general culture both the certain person, and society in general. Justice of tax system and, first of all, justice of system of redistribution of the public benefits and a gross revenue by means of the taxation is a key aspect in understanding of tax culture of society.

Fiscal regimes and the political economy of premodern states

Introduction 1. Studying fiscal regimes Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel Part I. Diversity and Commonalities in Early Extraction Regimes: 2. The Inka empire Terence N. D'Altroy 3. The Aztec empire Michael E. Smith 4. The Ancient Near East and Egypt Michael Jursa and Juan Carlos Morena Garcia Part II. Determinants of Intensification and Abatement: 5. Hellenistic empires Andrew Monson 6. The Roman republic James Tan 7. The early Roman monarchy Walter Scheidel 8. The later Roman empire Gilles Bransbourg 9. Early imperial China, from Qin/Han through Tang Mark E. Lewis 10. Imperial China under the Song and late Qing Kent Gang Deng Part III. Divergent Trends among Established Regimes: 11. Late Rome, Byzantium and early medieval western Europe John Haldon 12. The Middle East in Islamic late antiquity Hugh Kennedy 13. The Ottoman empire Metin M. Cosgel 14. Early modern Japan Philip C. Brown Part IV. Fragmented Political Ecologies and Institutional Innovation: 15. The Greek polis and koinon Emily Mackil 16. Classical Athens Josiah Ober 17. Why did public debt originate in Europe? David Stasavage Part V. Comparative Perspectives and New Frontiers: 18. Tributary empires and the New Fiscal Sociology: some comparative reflections Peter F. Bang 19. Interpreting the comparative history of fiscal regimes Edgar Kiser and Margaret Levi.

Myths of tourism institutionalization and Cancún

This interdisciplinary investigation revisits Cancún’s origins and tourism institutionalization. Original accounting documents separate myth and marketing from events to debunk widely disseminated misconceptions of the Mexican state’s role. This rare view of mass tourism emergence at a (trans)formative period demonstrates the historical processes, personalities and ploys. Against a backdrop of conflicts, a banking alliance sparked integrally planned tourism centers. Cancún was the brainchild of economics-trained central bankers inexperienced in tourism with a mandate to increase foreign revenue. Amid looming failure, the bankers swapped land-for-shares to portray the project as a financial success to its stakeholders. Combined with fiscal sociology, organizational theory institutionalization through a six-stage process serves to incrementally reveal the introduction of central planning, the linchpin of Mexico’s tourism predominance.

Dirty Money States: Illicit Economies and the State in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACTThis article develops the idea of “dirty money states” by defining and exploring the problem of illicit state financing in Southeast Asia. Most diagnoses of Southeast Asia's flourishing illicit economies focus on the prevalence of corruption and the “decay” of the state, but the authors of this essay develop a more nuanced explanation by exploring how states cultivate and sustain themselves through illicit extraction. Drawing from emerging literature on states and criminality, as well as fiscal sociology, they develop a novel theoretical framing for the six country case studies that comprise this thematic issue. Each study – on Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, East Timor, and the Philippines – examines empirically how illicit state financing works. Whether revenues derive from gold, timber, opium, aid agencies, or business interests, the authors identify consistent patterns in the nature and behavior of the state vis-à-vis illegally generated funds. These patterns encompass territorial dynamics and practices; the everyday social worlds of state actors and their entrepreneurial allies; and the paradoxical interplay between formal and informal realms. Ultimately the authors argue that illicit monies are fundamental to contemporary state building in the region, extending even to the delivery of public goods and services. These findings are potentially uncomfortable for scholars, governments and development practitioners, particularly because they challenge conventional ideas about how the strength and/or weakness of states might be understood in Southeast Asia. But they demand attention, since they are the product of an ambitious and unconventional research endeavor.

Taxation: Effects and Influences

Abstract Even if fiscal phenomenon is mainly public content, it directly influences besides the public and private sector. Module generates the settlement and collection of taxes from taxpayers targeted specific reactions, either undertakings or individuals. The purpose of this paper is to unravel the influence of taxation on taxpayers and tax effects on the economy arising from the phenomenon in general and individuals in their capacity as taxpayers. How fiscal phenomenon has a wide coverage and its influences are varied and can identified in the smallest details of the individual in social life and as a taxpayer, the actual consumer, employee or investor, the pensioner or person without income. Fiscal phenomenon by combining reaction generates around individuals targeted a real fiscal sociology. And eventually to its discerning influence seems to be or remain difficult fiscal policies only official and scientific approaches to the description or domain-specific measures proposed. Tax procedures in their complexity and conditioning current also generates related behavioral another of the taxpayer in relation to the tax authorities, other public bodies and their relations with other taxpayers. Not only techniques or can be aligned and continuous modernization but fiscal vocabulary developed by taking the connotation of words with specific technical field. Continuous adjustments of fiscal procedures, specific vocabulary are as complicated pea tat unimportant in front of the tax burden borne by taxpayers. Taxpayer's tax effort is what counts the most sensitive indicator reactions taxpayers. The effect is quantified in different ways phenomenon but the most important way to evaluate the results at the budget, I think is the quantification of tax revenues in absolute terms and relative indicator secondly on the tax burden and the level of taxation.

Pareto, fondateur à (re)découvrir de la sociologie des finances publiques

Les fondateurs italiens de la sociologie des finances publiques considèrent que la distinction entre gouvernants et gouvernés est centrale (tradition de Machiavel). Une place à part revient à Vilfredo Pareto qui, même s’il a enseigné à Lausanne, se rattache à la tradition italienne. Le Traité de sociologie générale part de la critique de la science financière pour montrer que les finances publiques relèvent des actions non logiques au service de l’élite au pouvoir. La théorie financière parétienne mobilise des analyses pertinentes pour nos sociétés, mais est peu connue en dépit de la renommée de ce classique. Elle s’inscrit dans la recherche complexe de l’équilibre social en relation avec la circulation des élites. Elle accepte des « approximations » méthodologiques pour souligner le rôle de l’idéologie, de l’action publique, du cycle économique, du clientélisme et de la spoliation de certaines classes sociales.

Taxes and Fiscal Sociology

This article reviews recent research in fiscal sociology. We specifically examine contributions to the study of taxation that illuminate core issues in the sociology of contemporary capitalism, including the causes of poverty and inequality in rich countries and of inequality between rich and poor countries. Research on developed countries suggests that tax policy changes are important for explaining rising income inequality, tax policies may structure durable inequalities of race and gender, and earnings-conditional tax subsidies may alleviate poverty more effectively and with less stigma than means-tested social spending. Scholars also find the most generous welfare states rely the most heavily on regressive taxes, although there is disagreement over how this association arises. Comparative research on developing countries shows consumption taxes are more conducive to growth than taxes on income, tax-financed spending benefits growth if it is spent on productive investments, and taxation strengthened democracy and state building in medieval and early modern Europe. However, there is disagreement as to whether taxation contributes to state building in contemporary developing countries and whether foreign aid undermines democracy by undermining taxation. These questions are the focus of considerable current research.

State Building and Taxation in Latin America

State Building and Taxation in Latin America Heidi Jane M. Smith Mobilizing Resources in Latin America: The Political Economy of Tax Reform in Chile and Argentina. By Omar Sánchez. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xi + 245. $85.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780230114463. Taxation and Society in Twentieth-Century Argentina. By José Antonio Sánchez Román. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. xiv + 245. $90.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780230341265. State-Building and Tax Regimes in Central America. By Aaron Schneider. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 243. $90.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781107019096. Taxing and spending are two main functions of a modern government, and citizens’ opinions on how they are taxed matter for creating an effective state apparatus. This is particularly true in Latin America, where states are considered to be weak and tax-to-GDP ratios are relatively low. While many scholars have studied the link between state formation and society through the lenses of fiscal sociology and tax policy, mainly in continental Europe and the United States, social scientists are only now beginning to evaluate this phenomenon in developing countries by using an institutionalist approach.1 Latin America has one of the world’s lowest tax rates per capita, and many people outright do not pay their share. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) reports that tax revenues, excluding social contributions, were on average about 17 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) compared to over 30 percent in more developed economies.2 The IDB notes that tax revenues from capital income and direct taxation (including income tax) are also low. In many countries, capital income is hardly taxed at all, and deductions are very high with many loopholes encouraging elites to evade paying.3 In Latin America the problems are exacerbated where highly regressive tax systems exist side by side with highly unequal income distribution. [End Page 256] Notably, there are very large discrepancies in tax burdens across countries and within states (at the subnational level). They range from the low burdens of countries endowed with nonrenewable resources like Mexico and Venezuela (about 10 percent of GDP), to high levels in countries like Brazil (36 percent of GDP).4 Brazil’s tax-to-GDP ratio is close to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average, but in some countries, such as Peru, Guatemala, and Haiti, government revenue is much lower, ranging between 10 and 20 percent of GDP. This reflects the inability of the government to bring more dynamic sectors of the economy into the tax net. State-society relations matter for how taxation systems are established within a country. To explore this ground, three scholars recently have published inquiries about the nature of civil society’s fiscal interaction with the state by evaluating how Latin American tax systems were built. Coming to the question from the disciplinary perspectives of history and political science rather than the well-worn paths of sociology and economics, the works adopt an institutionalist approach. They include an in-depth single case study, a classic two-country comparison, and a multicountry study. While the first two treat the more developed countries of the Southern Cone, the third examines less-developed Central America. Mobilizing Resources in Latin America: The Political Economy of Tax Reform in Chile and Argentina, by Omar Sánchez, suggests that while Argentina has failed to produce an appropriate social contract upon which to build fiscal legitimacy, Chile has been successful not only in collecting taxes but also in achieving impressive economic growth and macroeconomic stability sustained for decades. For Sánchez, the typical economic and rational-choice theories used to evaluate tax policy through the lenses of efficiency and effectiveness do not necessarily help us understand why a particular country pursues a specific set of fiscal policies. He evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of institutions by studying the political environment, policy operations, and group interactions that create a particular tax policy. He finds that Argentina constantly changed the rules of the tax game. Middling tax enforcement mechanisms at the national level, weak party systems, and the near absence of organized civil society hindered tax compliance. As a result, an effective state-society pact was never...

Empirical Analysis of Fiscal Soundness and Public Social Expenditure: A Lesson for the Future Direction of the Korean Welfare State

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relations between fiscal soundness and public social expenditure in advanced welfare states so as to reconsider the conventional wisdom that welfare expenditure aggravates national finances. Through this, I propose the clues of building the sustainable Korean welfare state. I focus on the interdependent relationship between fiscal soundness and public social expenditure based on fiscal sociology. Considering this interaction, I form two sets of simultaneous equations models and employ a special statistical method, three‐stage least squares (3SLS). The results regarding the causal relationship between fiscal soundness and public social spending indicate that, if public welfare spending is increased, fiscal health is damaged. However, as many comparative social policy researchers have pointed out, outcomes of welfare states differ from country to country according to the composition of public welfare spending. Specifically, some welfare states with priority given to social services such as vocational training or childcare services have maintained the stability of public finance. By extension, we can say that public social expenditures have a positive influence on fiscal soundness based on the composition of social expenditures. Finally, it is possible to create financially sustainable welfare states.

Response to Gerald M. Easter's review of State-Building and Tax Regimes in Central America

This valuable review of my book identifies core points and three potential areas of deepening: newly emerging elites, additional cases, and the challenge of fiscal sociology research in Central America. I address each in turn. As noted, contemporary elites share many characteristics with traditional elites, who are accurately described as incestuous, exclusive, and self-perpetuating. Some of the newly emerging elites are indeed drawn from the very families and networks that produced prior generations of elites. This evolution has been usefully described in ethnographic work by Central Americans such as Marta Casaús Arzú and North Americans such as Jeffrey Paige. They note that despite continuities, there are important differences in contemporary elites, perhaps because of the democratic regimes in which they operate, and especially because of their location atop transnationally integrated production processes. Still, while this structural position produces both conflicts and coincidences of interest with traditional elite actors, the precise pattern of intraelite relations is the outcome of contingent social processes captured by the dimensions of cohesion and dominance. Different combinations of cohesion and dominance in intraelite relations serve as a useful beginning to the analysis of tax-regime outcomes.

A Discussion on the European Debt Crisis by Fiscal Sociology


 
 
 The purpose of this article is that discuss the reasons of European debt crisis. Every European country adopts austerity policy, which cannot solve government debt problems and further lead to economic exacerbation and continuous recession, based on the neoclassical economic theory. In order to realize the root of European debt crisis, this article adopts the reaseach method of fiscal sociology. In this study, we think that the government debt problem is the result of economic profits conflict based on the Fiscal Sociology. The economic profits conflict of investment, consumption, international business and labor market will have influence on the government’s revenue and expenditure. Furthermore, the root of the European debt crisis is the uneven income distribution by financialization and neoliberalism.
 
 

Taxation, the State and Society: The Fiscal Sociology of Interventionist Democracy

Taxation, the State and Society: The Fiscal Sociology of Interventionist Democracy

Fiscal crisis and creative destruction: Critical reflections on Schumpeter’s contemporary relevance

Two matters addressed in the analyses of Joseph Schumpeter, namely fiscal crises to which modern ‘tax states’ are vulnerable and processes of ‘creative destruction’ intrinsic to modern capitalism, have grown steadily in significance since the mid-twentieth century. Schumpeter anticipated a continuing growth in demand for public services and forms of social provision and drew on aspects of Rudolf Goldscheid’s innovative designation of a critical new field of inquiry, ‘fiscal sociology’, to discuss fiscal limits to the state’s capacity to respond to needs and demands for social provision. The fiscal crisis symptoms identified by Schumpeter are argued to be bound up with much broader and more substantial underlying economic processes and tendencies exposed by Marx, in particular with social and economic costs arising from the necessity for continual rounds of ‘creative destruction’ which constitute an intrinsic feature of all phases in the development of the capitalist mode of production and have become even more prominent in ‘late’ globalized capitalism. The paper concludes by comparing Schumpeter’s unidirectional view of the state–capital relationship with views outlined by other social and economic analysts for whom the contradiction between capitalist economy and the public household or common good is paramount.

Taxation, Representation and Executive Constraints: An Empirical Examination of the Fiscal Sociology Hypothesis

This paper explores the logic of the sociological approach to the relation between taxation and representation. In general, this approach states that taxation is a type of social interaction that leads, in the long term, to the development of democracy. The core proposition is that of a bargaining between ruling elites who seek to maximize revenue, and societal actors who seek to protect themselves from predation.In spite of the current popularity of this sociological approach to taxation, the particular form of the hypothesis is convoluted, and the evidence marshalled in its support is ambiguous. What is the effect of taxation on institutional development? To address this question, the paper proceeds by disentangling the argument and examining the logic and the evidence for alternative specifications of the theory. It then tests one version of the theory using pooled time-series cross-national data for about 130 countries between 1970 and 2009. The paper presents consistent evidence for a small effect of taxation as a proportion of society wealth on the constraints rulers face when making decisions, especially in the longer run. The results are robust to different model specifications and sample sizes. The paper also presents some weaker evidence for alternative forms of the theory. The first section reviews the theoretical arguments and the empirical findings regarding the taxation/representation relation. The second section discusses the methodology and presents the data and the results. The third section concludes by arguing that theoretical and empirical work requires more conceptual precision and careful methodological choices.

Book Review: Book Review of Fiscal Sociology and the Theory of Public Finance: An Exploratory Essay

Public finance theory has historically treated government as an omniscient actor working outside of the market. The state is assumed to be able to identify problems and take the necessary action to fix them. In this book, Wagner redefines the foundational assumptions of public finance. Instead of an omniscient actor, state, like markets, is an emergent order where people interact. While this book leaves certain applications underdeveloped, it addresses important implications of a social-theoretic approach to public finance. This book provides a strong critique to welfare economics, and lays the groundwork for future scholars to redefine how we think about public finance.

The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective

The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective

Discuss the Management of Fiscal Information in Taiwan by Fiscal Sociology

Taiwan's fiscal transparency exists the following deficiencies--the repeating characters and functions in the government, the vague boundaries of government department, the differential definition of government's debts between Taiwan's regulations and international's, inadequate disclosure of economic hypotheses and fiscal risks, and the contents of budget report without systematically. Furthermore, the unreasonable resources distribution between profession and non-professional hierarchy is the reasons of imbalance between supply and demand of fiscal information in Taiwan.