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The tax burden, defined as the ratio of the collected taxes in a particular period against the total product, is commonly used to determine the effect of fiscal and tax policies on the socioeconomic structure. The purpose of this study is to examine how the changes in some macroeconomic indicators affect the tax burden.

System generalized method of moments approach is used for 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members in the period of 1993-2016.

Based on the research findings, variables such as income per capita, foreign trading volume, the capacity of employment, unemployment and economic share of industry sector effect tax burden in a statistically significant and positive direction. The reason that lies behind the positive effect of unemployment on tax burden is the fact that the sense of social state is not abandoned. Thus, it is predicted that the state will increase public transfer expenditures in the short term due to unemployment, this increase will impose a financial burden on the public sector both in the medium and long term and finally, there will be an increase in the tax burden.

Results in the literature suggest that there are many reasons for increasing tax burden such as socio-economic development, financial and organizational structure and the globalization process. However, according to this study, it seems that gross domestic product per capita, the size of the industry sector, openness, employment capacity and unemployment rate also have a positive and significant effect on tax burden in the long run. Ultimately, these results demonstrate that tax burden, one of the most important indicators of the public sector size in the sample of the states and period in hand, is influenced positively by all independent variables and increases slightly but surely. These results suggest that the tax state is still a determinative factor in the socioeconomic field within its taxation tools.

The paper aims to examine the impact of social capital on the size of the shadow economy in the BIRCS countries over the period 1995–2014.

The authors employ the Bayesian linear regression method to uncover the relationship between social capital and the shadow economy. The method applies a normal distribution for the prior probability distribution while the posterior distribution is determined using the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique.

The results indicate that the unemployment rate and tax burden positively affect the size of the shadow economy. By contrast, corruption control and trade openness are negatively associated with the development of this informal sector. Moreover, the paper's primary finding is that social capital represented by social trust and tax morale can hinder the size of the shadow economy.

This study is limited to the case of the BRICS countries for the period 1995–2014. The determinants of the shadow economy in different groups of countries can be heterogeneous. Moreover, social capital is a multidimensional concept that may consist of various components. This difficulty of measuring the social capital calls for further research on the relationship between other dimensions of social capital and the shadow economy.

Many studies investigate the effect of economic factors on the size of the shadow economy. This paper applies a new approach to discover the issue. Notably, the authors use the Bayesian linear regression method to analyze the relationship between social capital and the shadow economy in the BRICS countries.

This paper aims to assess the fiscal sustainability in Egypt during the period 1990–2018 using deficit accounts (DA) approach. It also tries to investigate the possibility of applying generational accounts (GA) in Egypt as a new approach to assess fiscal sustainability.

This paper tries to assess fiscal sustainability in Egypt during 1990–2018 using DA and GA approaches. DA approach includes primary deficit indicator, tax gap indicator, augmented Dickey-Fuller stationarity test for debt/GDP ratio and Johansen co-integration test between government revenues and expenditures. However, concerning the possibility of applying GA in Egypt, field study form was designed including specific questions to academic and executive economic experts to investigate if it is possible to apply GA in Egypt.

The empirical findings of the field study indicate that Egypt witnessed fiscal sustainability during the period 1990–2018 using DA. On the other hand, there are various obstacles, including administrative, technical, legal and political obstacles which hinder Egypt from applying GA to assess fiscal sustainability.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper assesses fiscal sustainability in Egypt using DA for a longer and updated time series within 1990–2018. In addition, it is the first paper to examine the possibility of assessing fiscal sustainability using GA approach in Egypt.

This paper aims to evaluate the progressivity of health-care financing in Egypt by assessing all five financing sources individually and then combining them to analyze the equity of the whole financing system.

Lorenz dominance analysis and Kakwani progressivity index were applied on data from 2010/2011 Household Income, Expenditure, and Consumption Survey and the National Health Accounts 2011 using Stata to evaluate the progressivity of each source of health-care finance and the financing system overall.

The data show that Egypt’s health-care system, which is largely financed by out-of-pocket (OOP) payments, is slightly regressive, with an overall Kakwani index of −0.079. The overall regressive effect was the result of three regressive sources (OOP payments, an earmarked cigarette tax and direct taxes), one proportional finance source (social health insurance) and two slightly progressive sources (indirect taxes and private health insurance). This shows that the burden of financing health care falls more on the poor. These results signal the need for reform of health-care financing in Egypt to reduce dependence on OOP payments to achieve more equitable financing.

The paper seeks to augment the literature on health-care financing in Egypt by calculating specific progressivity estimates for all five sources of financing the Egyptian health-care system and analyzing the overall equity of this financing system. It will, therefore, provide a benchmark for monitoring the equity of finance in the Egyptian health-care system in future studies and allow one to assess the impact of implemented financing reforms in the future on the level of progressivity of health system financing.

This study aims to estimate the pass-through rate of the increases in the excise tax and TCF tax on tobacco in Vietnam. This study seeks to shed light on how the tax burden is split between consumers and producers and inform policy discussions in the country. Using panel micro-level data collected from three waves of a nationwide retailer's survey, this study provides an evidence-based pass-through estimation for tobacco tax in Vietnam and contributes to the understanding of tax policy on smoking and smoking-related issues.

Following increases in the excise tax and TCF tax on tobacco in 2019, the differential effect of the tax hike on the “treatment group” (domestic cigarettes) versus the “control group” (illicit cigarettes) using a difference-in-difference (DID) analysis has been studied. The study utilized unique longitudinal retailers’ data on cigarettes prices in Vietnam from 2018 to 2019 to estimate the tax pass-through rate for some of the most popular factory-made cigarette brands.

This study found evidence of an over-shifting of cigarette taxes on smokers. Specifically, it discovered that the tax increase is absorbed more by low-priced brand smokers compared to premium brand users due to (1) the limited increase in prices under a pure ad valorem system and (2) the way the Vietnamese currency is denominated. Additionally, there is evidence of cushioning to mitigate price shock on consumers as the real prices increase gradually over the period of one year after the tax change.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to collect and analyze a unique panel micro-level data from three waves of a nationwide retailers’ survey, which captures the changes in marketing and pricing strategies of the tobacco industry in Vietnam before and after an increase in excise tax in 2019. The results of this study could be used as a reference for future policymakers in considering increasing taxes on tobacco.

Practices of transfer pricing in among companies having “special relationship” (hubungan istimewa in Bahasa Indonesia, this study uses a term of ‘related party’) to others are very common nowadays. However, the complexity of transfer pricing strategy and practices in many companies made the use of individual level data become insufficient, therefore we conduct an ethnographic study to explore how taxpayer determines the reasonable transfer pricing based on five methods (i.e. Comparable uncontrolled Price/CUP, Resale Price/RPM, Cost Plus, Transactional Net Margin Method/TNMM and Profit Split Method/PSM).This research aims to execute a tax strategy based on those methods, which finally derive the amount of product price according to arm.s length transfer pricing rule. We collected the data through interviews, observation and literatures. They are based on several months of personal experience of field research in and around the manufacturing enterprise. The results showed that the tax expense could be reduced by using Cost Plus Method, but practically, the application of this method requires more in-depth analysis and a very reliable & comparative data so the company must spend a lot of cost and time to process it. The Transactional Net Profit Method is proved to be the best application for the enterprise to optimize tax expenses because the data used for the analysis were more accessible which saved time and costs.

This study examines whether and how government fiscal pressure influences corporate charitable giving (CCG).

The authors exploit sub-national tax revenue sharing changes as exogenous variations to government’s fiscal pressure at the city level and then construct a quasi difference-in-differences (DiD) model to conduct the analysis based on a sample that consists of 14,168 firm-year observations in China during the period of 2003 to 2012.

The authors found that firms increase charitable donations when local governments face higher fiscal pressure. Such effects are more pronounced for firms that have stronger demand for political connectedness in the sample period. Furthermore, this study’s findings suggest that the timing strategy of donating helps firms to lower the effective tax rate and to build stronger political connections. In addition, donating firms outperform non-donating firms in terms of bank loan access and market reputation.

The authors contribute to at least three lines of literature: first, extend the understanding of timing strategies of corporate charitable behaviors; second, contribute to the literature studying the “crowd out” effect between government-provided charitable funds and private donations; finally, contribute to the emerging literature exploring the financial interests associated with corporate donation strategy (Claessens et al., 2008; Cull et al., 2015).

This paper aims to present a study on the effect of income and expense shifting on the corporate income tax evasion – an example of intentional noncompliance practiced by tax agents. The authors expected that the tool used would differentiate the extent of understatement of tax liability.

Two experiments were conducted in which young (N = 62) and experienced (N = 68) tax agents read a scenario placing them in a position of an employee responsible for tax planning and calculations of tax liabilities. The respondents’ task was to decide about the extent of the tax liability understatement using income or expense shifting.

Research demonstrated significantly higher extent of corporate income tax understatement when using income shifting compared to expense shifting in case of experienced tax agents (Study 2) and on tendency level among young tax agents (Study 1).

Results of the studies might be of interest to managers paying attention to tax procedures within the company, governmental agencies investigating corporate tax evasion, as well as educators responsible for tax agents’ initial training and lifelong learning.

This study concentrates on tax agents who are employed in companies and corporate income tax evasion, which has not been analyzed in the literature so far.

This study investigates the transparency of budgets by examining its relationship with financial sustainability, which is a central area of research in the public-sector context.

Referring to the public value framework, a large sample of 110 countries has been investigated, implementing econometric models where the dependent variable is the Open Budget Index (OBI), published by the International Budget Partnership (IBP), and the test variables are different indicators of financial sustainability.

The results that emerge from the analysis suggest that budget transparency could be positively associated with the financial sustainability of governments, beyond the traditional aims of enhancing citizens' trust and participation.

This research offers important insights for policy areas, suggesting that improving budget transparency could be beneficial for public administrations because of the positive association with financial sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship of inheritance tax behavior with normative value principles and factors found relevant for income tax compliance. Also, it examines the influence of affectedness and earmarking on inheritance tax compliance. Furthermore, it compares two countries similar in tax morale, tax culture as well as dominant normative value principles, Austria and Germany, of which one – Germany – levies inheritance taxes and the other – Austria – is debating its reintroduction.

A two (affected vs nonaffected) by two (Austria vs Germany) by two (inheritance tax vs stock profit tax) by three (no earmarking vs social justice earmarking vs equality of opportunity earmarking) experimental online questionnaire was conducted with 296 Austrians and 230 Germans.

Normative value principles and other socio-psychological variables play an important role concerning inheritance tax behavior. Affectedness does not influence inheritance tax compliance. Earmarking inheritance tax to projects corresponding to these value principles increases inheritance tax compliance in the Austrian sample and could represent a measure to increase inheritance tax compliance in countries implementing inheritance tax or increasing inheritance tax.

This study draws a comprehensive picture of the socio-psychological variables relevant to inheritance tax behavior and tests the effect of earmarking as a policy measure to increase inheritance tax compliance.