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This is the second set of lecture notes from courses in public finance published in an archival volume in this series. Volume 19-C (2001) was entirely devoted to notes from lectures by E. R. A. Seligman at Columbia University. Two differences mark Seligman’s lectures and the lectures by Henry C. Simons at Chicago, as reported below. Seligman seems to have been lecturing primarily to students in tax administration, hence he presented very little economic theory; whereas Simons was lecturing to graduate students in economics, and presented relatively more theory. Seligman did not refrain from some passing of judgment but his lectures were largely descriptive and non-judgmental; whereas Simons has no hesitation in presenting his own normative approach on various issues. These issues tended strongly to focus on inequality, tax justice, and progressivity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the commonly used policy approach to subsidize the private provision of public goods by granting agents deductions with respect to their income or corporate tax burden.

In the framework of a microeconomic representative agent model the commonly used policy approach to subsidize donations by granting agents deductions with respect to their income tax burden is examined. The paper especially considers that most income tax schemes are progressive and deductibility is limited. After pointing to the problems arising from these specific properties of tax‐refund schemes the paper turns towards the effects that such a tax‐refund scheme has with respect to donations on the one hand and welfare on the other hand.

Findings shows that the effects of the commonly practiced methods of supporting donations depend crucially on the specific properties of the tax scheme and preferences of agents. While Pareto‐improvements and even Pareto‐efficiency can result from the implementation of such a scheme, it is also conceivable that some agents perceive a utility reduction.

The analysis builds on a static approach although taxation also exerts important dynamic effects. These effects have been neglected in the current paper as the interaction of taxation and preferences is already quite complex. However, they should be considered in future research.

Owing to the dependency of welfare effects on the tariff structure, income tax reforms as they are planned in many countries might not only induce a reduction in donations, but might as a result also alter the induced welfare effects.

The paper shows that the generally applied tax‐refund schemes constitute no effective means to induce optimal donation levels. Implications depend crucially on, e.g. deductibility ceilings and progressiveness of tax rates.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the poultry farmer's willingness to pay for agricultural tax in the Dormaa Municipality of Ghana. Besides, the study analysed the mean agricultural tax and constraints impeding the payment of the agricultural tax.

One hundred (100) poultry farmers were selected for the study. The logit and Kendall’s coefficient of concordance were used to examine the factors that influence payment of agricultural tax and the constraints impeding the payment of the agricultural tax, respectively.

Instructively, 83% of the respondents were interested in the regressive taxation model relative to 12 and 5% who were interested in the proportional and progressive taxation model, respectively. The empirical results of the logit model revealed that tax awareness, probability of being audited and public service provision of roads influenced the poultry farmer's decision to pay for the agricultural tax. Perception of corruption and high tax rates were the primary constraints impeding the payment of the agricultural tax. The results further revealed that the farmers are willing to pay an average maximum amount of Ghc 152.00 (US 26 dollars) agricultural tax per month.

Despite the increasing relevance of agricultural tax, studies on poultry farmer's willingness to pay agricultural tax have been scarce in West Africa, particularly, Ghana. As a consequence, this paper broadens the frontiers of the existing literature on agricultural tax as well as the constraints impeding the poultry farmers to pay agricultural tax.

C.A.R. Crosland (1918‐1977) was a British politician and a Cabinet Minister. He was also a former lecturer in economics at Oxford. His interests in Labour politics and in the mixed economy led him to write The Future of Socialism. Published in 1956, it is a contemporary classic of political economy and social economics. Abridged when it was reprinted in 1964, however, the edition of the Future which readers today will know is significantly different from the original edition that exercised so much influence in the 1950s. Attempts to provide a variorum that identifies the differences between the editions. Finds that 172 pages were subject to alteration and deletion. Suggests the ways in which the changes might have altered the message that the author intended to convey.

A tax based on land value is in many ways ideal, but many economists dismiss it by assuming it could not raise enough revenue. Standard sources of data omit much of the potential tax base, and undervalue what they do measure. The purpose of this paper is to present more comprehensive and accurate measures of land rents and values, and several modes of raising revenues from them besides the conventional property tax.

The paper identifies 16 elements of land's taxable capacity that received authorities either trivialize or omit. These 16 elements come in four groups.

In Group A, Elements 1‐4 correct for the downward bias in standard sources. In Group B, Elements 5‐10 broaden the concepts of land and rent beyond the conventional narrow perception, while Elements 11‐12 estimate rents to be gained by abating other kinds of taxes. In Group C, Elements 13‐14 explain how using the land tax, since it has no excess burden, uncaps feasible tax rates. In Group D, Elements 15‐16 define some moot possibilities that may warrant further exploration.

This paper shows how previous estimates of rent and land values have been narrowly limited to a fraction of the whole, thus giving a false impression that the tax capacity is low. The paper adds 14 elements to the traditional narrow “single tax” base, plus two moot elements advanced for future consideration. Any one of these 16 elements indicates a much higher land tax base than economists commonly recognize today. Taken together they are overwhelming, and cast an entirely new light on this subject.

Seligman is an important and ironically somewhat neglected figure today in the history of American economic thought. However, an examination of his scholarly achievements reveals that he had a considerable impact on the development of professional economics in America and could count the most influential economists in Europe as personal friends and collaborators (Moss, 2003; Rutherford, 2004; Mehrotra, 2005). Asso and Fiorito (2006), in their introduction to Seligman's autobiography (1929) argue that ‘his personal influence as an academic economist, as a teacher and as a central figure in the dissemination of economic knowledge was second to none and perhaps more meaningful than any single work he wrote’ (p. 1). They also record (quoting his student, Alvin Johnson) that ‘with Seligman…American economics began to acquire a distinctive professional reputation, some very high scholarly standards and a sort of “moral magnificence”’ (p. 2). What this means is that through Seligman's work and guidance economics came to encompass a moral dimension that fed through into social policies, many of which were adopted by American legislatures. The major influences on his method included the German Historical School and a number of heterodox Continental writers that informed Seligman's in great Whig interpretation of the development of economics. He also engaged critically with the more abstract methods of contemporary economic analysis of the early twentieth century.

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argued against planned economies that “the close interdependence of all economic phenomena makes it difficult to stop planning just where we wish…once the free working of the market is impeded beyond a certain degree, the planner will be forced to extend his controls till they become all-comprehensive” (Hayek, 1944, p. 79). According to Hayek, and especially Mises, there exists no stable condition in-between laissez faire capitalism and the planned economy. Once politicians engaged in acts of interventionism further interventions would successively lead them towards a condition where the state fully planned and controlled the economy and civil society. According to Austrians, ‘interventionism’ thus represented an unstable and self-reinforcing condition (Burton, 1984, p. 110). In John Gray's words “whenever an interventionist policy…fails to achieve the desires result, the practical and theoretical response of the interventionist ideologue is to demand an extension of the policy to new fields…interventionist policies will always interpret the failure of any such policy, not as a reason in favour of its abandonment, but rather as one supporting its wider application”(Gray, 1984, p. 32).