Global Taxation How Modern Taxes Conquered the World

by Genschel, Philipp; Seelkopf, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780192897572
• ISBN10: 0192897578
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2022-05-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Global Taxation investigates the global transition to modern taxation from the 18th century to today. Modern taxation refers to the broad-based tax instruments that allowed for the emergence of big government as we know it today, including, most prominently, income taxes and general consumption taxes. The volume draws on a new historical dataset of tax introduction worldwide to map the global spread of modern taxes descriptively and to explore its correlates analytically. It makes four contributions to the literature. First, it corrects a pervasive Western bias in historical political economy and fiscal sociology. Most of this literature focuses heavily on the tax policy of advanced democracies in Europe. The chapters of this volume explore how far Western theories and insights travel to non-Western contexts. Second, the volume mitigates a recency bias in much of the macro-quantitative literature in comparative political economy and public finance. The chapters investigate whether insights travel across time from recent to more distant periods of observation. Third, the volume compensates for the substantive preoccupation of extant research with the personal income tax and the VAT by extending the analysis to other important tax instruments: the corporate income tax, the inheritance tax, non-VAT sales taxes, and social security contributions. Finally, the volume goes beyond the prevalent methodological nationalism in fiscal sociology and comparative political economy. It shows that non-sovereign tax introductions were common in colonial and imperial settings and compares analytically how the logic of these non-sovereign introductions differed from sovereign ones.

Author Biography

Philipp Genschel, Joint Chair in European Public Policy, European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies,Laura Seelkopf, Assistant Professor of International Political Economy, School of Economics and Political Science, University of St.Gallen

Philipp Genschel holds a Joint Chair in European Public Policy at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the European University Institute in Florence. He is a Professor of Political Science at Jacobs University Bremen and the University
of Bremen.


Laura Seelkopf is Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at the University of St.Gallen. Previously she held positions at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, the European University Institute in Florence, as well as at Jacobs University Bremen, and the University of Bremen.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Global Pathways to Modern Taxation, Philipp Genschel and Laura Seelkopf
Part I. Variance Across Space and Mode
2. War and Modern Taxation, Jakob Frizell
3. Fiscal Development Under Colonial and Sovereign Rule, Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg
4. Trajectories of Taxation in Uganda and Senegal, Klaus Schlichte
5. The Historical Roots of Post-Communist Taxation, Arpad Todor
Part II. Variance Across Time and Tax
6. Democratization and Tax Innovation, Junko Kato and Miki Toyofuku
7. Recessions and Tax Introductions, Andrea Papadia and Zbigniew Truchlewski
8. Political Institutions and Income Taxes, Per F. Andersson
9. The Rise of General Consumption Taxes, Joseph Ganderson and Julian Limberg
10. Social Security Contributions and the Fiscal Origins of the Welfare State, Achim Kemmerling