Tax collection is difficult in low-income countries, and bureaucracies exist alongside non-state actors that extract revenue and provide services informally. Might weak states leverage these actors’ strengths to collect taxes, or should they invest in building fiscal capacity on their own? We conducted a field experiment in Lagos, Nigeria that randomly assigned market vendors to tax appeals delivered by state or non-state agents. Contrary to expectations, non-state actors were not effective messengers. Tax appeals delivered by representatives of marketplace associations, an important social intermediary in this context, were ineffective even at higher levels of trust and message credibility. Messages delivered by state agents, however, were sometimes effective in spurring registration and tax payments, especially among ethnic minorities. This study underlines the importance of social intermediaries in shaping the social contract, and it draws attention to the uneven effects of these kinds of institutions within populations.

This Social Policy and Society themed section examines a number of key social policy challenges in relation to the role that taxation measures and choices play, or can play, in shaping responses to them. Although the role of taxation is frequently recognised in assessments of these issues, it remains under-explored within social policy scholarship. The themed section offers an opportunity to explore the relevance of taxation policy design and choices to these challenges and contribute to the ongoing social policy debate on these issues.

Throughout this themed section we have examined a number of key social policy challenges in relation to the role that taxation measures and choices play, or can play, in shaping responses to them. The following is a list of learning and research resources on topics that are central to these themes. For the most part, we have focused on recently published contributions.

This paper sets up a small open economy two-agent model and addresses the size of output multiplier of government spending associated with taxation either on constrained households or on unconstrained households. The paper shows that the tax financing rule matters to real resource allocations in the small open economy with flexible prices and equal tax burden at the steady state, contrasting to the finding of Monacelli and Perotti (2011) in closed economies. The output multiplier in open economies is larger than the multiplier in closed economies when taxes are levied on constrained households, while the reverse holds under taxations on unconstrained households.

New fiscal histories of the United States are in a state of efflorescence. Revisionist work infused with economic heterodoxy and social histories of capitalism have rescued fiscal topics from staid institutionalists, producing work that should enrich the study of inequalities of all stripes. By assembling a collection of recent works on money, public debt, and taxation—subjects treated in isolation within the literature, but which form a totality in practice—this review attempts a composite portrait of the United States’ fiscal state formation in the long run. Present in the foreground and at each stage is real estate: the iconic plot of farmland or single-family home.

In affluent democracies, a broad rise in wealth concentration since the 1980s has not been accompanied by a broad rise in wealth taxation. As a large literature points out, conditions such as growing financialization, tax competition and tax avoidance have all curtailed the ability of left governments to tax wealth. This article argues that, despite the global constraint on taxing wealth, as left governments continue to influence wealth concentration and more advanced economies enter an era of slowing population growth, financial wealth of the rich tends to gain at the expense of (more equal) housing wealth. In response, left governments increase taxes on financial assets relative to housing wealth. By contrast, when population growth is still high, left subtly by adjusting the relative difference by which different types of wealth are taxed. In particular, as governments tax housing wealth more heavily instead. These predictions are tested using data from 15 to 16 advanced economies (1970–2015).

This article problematises two concepts frequently used in debates about resource allocation.

The term ‘system’ evokes a ‘unified whole’ and emphasises interaction among the different component parts within the system. However, the notion of a tax system insulated from the world around it obstructs an analysis of the ways in which interactions of tax arrangements with other elements of society shape distributional outcomes. The article argues that tax arrangements need to be understood as an open system.

Next, the article problematises the concept of ‘redistribution’ by examining the limitations of current approaches to redistribution. First, pre-distribution, referring to decisions about tax expenditures, is often overlooked, although it reflects allocation decisions that not only benefit recipients but also result in foregone revenues that might have been used for redistribution. Second, analyses of redistribution often focus exclusively on income. Third, taxes shape the kind of society we have in ways that limit future possibilities of redistribution. The article proposes the concept of structural redistribution to denote redistribution, which goes beyond redistribution among groups to change the nature of society.

What gives the benefit principle its moral appeal as an idea of tax justice? And what can count as a benefit for that purpose? My claim is that we can trace the moral force of various versions of the principle to five ideas: individual justification, causal feedback, reciprocity, opposable valuation and non-objectionable baseline. I develop those ideas into an account of the moral permissibility of benefit-based taxation, and explain how that account addresses problems about the quantification and valuation of benefits and the relationship between benefit and the justice of the background distribution.

Discussions about economic equality have, in recent years, extended beyond considerations of income distribution to encompass the distribution of wealth and its intergenerational transfer. Driven by new and more frequent data, a better understanding is emerging of the concentration of wealth within society and the dynamics of its transfer between generations.

This article contributes to that discussion by assessing the economic and social rationales for the taxation of intergenerational wealth transfers. It outlines the social policy case for inheritances taxes grounded in vertical equity principles. Then it presents comparative data on household wealth across high-income European countries before focusing on one of these, Ireland, to consider whether current inheritance taxation policies counter or perpetuate these inequalities. Focusing on that system, the article explores a range of inheritance taxation reforms intended to address wealth inequality while providing recurring funds for public services and redistribution.

This article introduces the Japanese Furusato Nozei Tax System, whereby citizens can designate part of their tax burden to be transferred to as a financial contribution to a prefecture or municipality of their choice, thereby creating an alternative means of taxation. Given that the Furusato Nozei System is gaining widespread popularity, this paper investigates some of its inherent contradictions, its rationale, history and certain paradoxical features of this controversial tax system.

The impact of redistributive policies on voluntary contributions is still not well understood. While a higher level of redistributive taxation decreases the price of voluntary giving, it also changes the income distribution by decreasing income inequality. This paper provides a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the net impact of the tax rate on public goods provision. The experimental findings show that while the participants decrease their voluntary contributions as the pre-tax income distribution becomes more equal, they increase their contributions with taxation. These findings have important implications for government policies regarding privately provided public goods.