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Christians faced the specific problem of reconciling capital punishment with the belief in the sanctity of human life. ‘God made man in his own image’ (Genesis). However the Church, from the time of Constantine, found it advantageous to ally itself with the State in order to forward and exploit its influence and authority. This alliance involved the Church in a cruel penal system: in fact, it introduced a new capital crime, heresy. Such disquiet as there was largely went underground. When dissent was expressed, Jesus was called up as an advocate for the cause, not as a missionary for penal reform (his Kingdom was not of this world), but because of his life, teaching, and vision of a New Age. Of our two Italian abolitionists, the devout Catholic Pelli repeatedly invoked the Christian God and the Sermon on the Mount. Earlier it was a Protestant, Sébastian Castellion, who caused a stir. Castellion campaigned fiercely against the criminalization of heresy, following the brutal execution of Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in 1553 in Calvin’s Geneva. Castellion, however, was striking a blow for freedom of belief rather than for the abolition of capital punishment as such.
Using an original representative survey of 3,179 participants, we study the determinants of support for reintroducing inheritance taxation in Mexico. Two scenarios are analysed: a universal tax and a progressive tax applied only to inheritances exceeding USD 1 million (purchasing power parity [PPP]). While support for the universal tax is low (13.3 per cent), the progressive tax garners significant backing (41.8 per cent), reflecting a preference for progressivity. Regression and lasso models reveal that perceptions of tax evasion among the wealthy are the strongest predictors of support for the progressive tax. At the same time, trust in government is critical for the universal tax. Contrary to findings in high-income countries, fairness concerns such as the proportion of wealth from inheritance or corruption or reasons for poverty play a limited role in shaping attitudes. These findings provide valuable insights for tax policy design in unequal societies and emphasise the importance of addressing perceptions of compliance.
This chapter examines how terrorism can affect the public finances. The literature identifies three main ways in which terrorism can affect fiscal outcomes. First, by influencing real economic activity and, thereby, government revenues, fiscal deficits and public debt. Second, by negatively affecting both the tax base and the efficiency of the tax administration. Third, by changing the composition of government spending in favor of military outlays. We confirm the importance of these three channels through new research on the impact of major terrorism shocks on macroeconomic and fiscal variables´ dynamics using an unbalanced panel of 191 heterogeneous countries from 1970 to 2018. We find that a terrorist shock lowers a country’s real GDP as well as government tax revenues and raises the debt-to-GDP ratio. The composition of government spending shifts in favor of military spending. Low-income countries are affected more than both emerging market and advanced economies.
Edited by
Latika Chaudhary, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California,Tirthankar Roy, London School of Economics and Political Science,Anand V. Swamy, Williams College, Massachusetts
This chapter offers a global perspective on Indian education in the colonial era. Indian literacy was significantly below Western Europe in 1800 when adult English literacy (53%) was ten times higher than that of India (estimated to be 6%). While schooling and literacy increased between 1870 and 1940, improvement in India was small compared to the rest of the world. Low income, low fiscal capacity and being a colony all constrained colonial India’s ability to expand mass education, along with norms, for example, that undervalued female education.
Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) introduced Canada’s first excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) in 2022. Industry marketing practices in response to SSB taxation may affect public health impacts. We examined changes in posted beverage pricing and marketing of taxable and non-taxable beverages in NL before and after the SSB tax was implemented.
Design:
Pre-/post-observational study with in-store audits of beverage prices and marketing. Changes including pricing discounts and promotions were assessed at the individual beverage level for pre/post-tax implementation years.
Setting:
Eighty food stores (grocery, convenience, drug and dollar) in NL, Canada.
Results:
There was no evidence of a change in posted shelf prices between pre/post years. There was a significant increase (+2·5 %, χ2 = 9·693, P = 0·002) in proportion of discounted taxable SSB with no change in non-taxable beverages (P = 0·350). There were no significant differences in change of number of promotions for taxable SSB (+5·2 [−0·1, 10·5], F = 3·789, P = 0·053) nor non-taxable beverages (+3·4 [–1·0, 7·7], F = 2·268, P = 0·134).
Conclusions:
The lack of change in posted prices of taxable SSB indicates that the NL SSB tax was not communicated at the point of decision-making. While some marketing changes post-tax were observed, results should be interpreted cautiously as they cannot be attributed definitively to the tax. Existing literature implies that industry may adapt marketing conduct to counteract beverage taxes. Such changes were limited in NL, suggesting retailers may have opted not to display the tax rather than attempt to actively counteract it. Lack of transparency surrounding the tax may neutralise intended behavioural effects.
Although charitable foundations play an important role in modern Western civil societies, knowledge about them and the factors that encourage their prevalence is still quite limited. The relevant literature acknowledges that Switzerland has proven a fertile ground for foundation growth, and in this paper, we develop and empirically test a model in order to examine the effects of the country’s economic and political incentive structure on foundation activity. We find that alongside the required income level that is an important determinant of foundation prevalence, tax incentives, and direct democracy have significant influence on individuals’ philanthropic behavior, as each account for approximately 10 % of the variance in the model presented here.
Spring 1971 represented the final consequential leftist and radical impact on the Vietnam antiwar movement. The spring offensive demonstrations took place in a compressed two-week period in Washington, DC. Veterans also played a key role in revealing American war crimes. Liberals maintained antiwar pressure largely by concentrating on the continuing US air war. Allies within the government helped produce the twenty-sixth constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to eighteen. The movement continued evolving during the 1972 presidential contest. National coalitions and mass demonstrations gave way to smaller collaborations and more focused projects. Military veterans conducted war crimes investigations, activists withheld war taxes and pressured corporate militarists, citizens defended First Amendment rights against government disinformation, unique projects provided entertainment and advertising, and the entire movement confronted the air war. As military realities brought the war’s end closer, the antiwar movement mobilized street demonstrations but worked primarily through electoral politics.
This chapter explores the stories of urban and rural protesters, female boycotters and spinners, Black rebels and runaways, and Indigenous combatants who engaged in protests, boycotts, and mob action to assert their political and personal legitimacy on the eve of the American Revolution. The study of material culture demonstrates that the quest for liberty became central to American life through things; objects ranging from the mundane to the elite made the lofty, abstract goals of political protest tangible to men and women throughout the British colonies. Physical artifacts – whether built spaces, printed visuals, homespun fabrics, seized cargo, or tokens of war – illustrated a convergence of material culture and collective action in the 1760s and 1770s. The material culture and performance of protest played an important role in fueling the social and political unrest that pushed the colonies toward revolution.
This chapter contends that Italy was exceptionally wealthy during the Early Empire, both in real and nominal terms. Italy’s prosperity stemmed from several sources: substantial booty, taxes, and rents were diverted from the provinces to the empire’s core; provincial elites engaged in imperial politics were expected to spend lavishly in Rome and its environs; and returns on Italian land were relatively high. Additionally, high prices in Italy for both real estate and commodities augmented Italy’s wealth in nominal terms.
Chapter 13 evaluates the challenges of SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, which aims to reduce economies’ material footprints and related waste emissions to support a shift toward more environmentally responsible practices. Global trends in material resource extraction and waste emissions are reviewed, highlighting increasing per capita resource use, rising resource intensity, and escalating waste emissions. Water, land, and air pollution can impose significant economic costs due to their impacts on human health and well-being and degradation of the stock of natural capital, including ecosystems. Policy options for reducing waste emissions are compared and contrasted. Market-based mechanisms, like taxes or tradable permits, offer cost-effectiveness but may not ensure sufficient environmental protection in uncertain conditions. Conversely, regulations enforced by penalties may be necessary for meeting standards, particularly for hazardous waste, although they can introduce uncertainty about producer costs. Other strategies, such as liability for compensation and environmental assurance bonds, aim to encourage waste reduction, reuse, and recycling.
Chapter 7 explains the range of policy tools decision-makers can use to correct incentives for an oversupply of environmental “bads” and an undersupply of environmental “goods” in markets. There are two critical steps to address the underlying causes of environmental mismanagement. Step 1 involves removing existing policy distortions. Step 2 explains how policy options can be used to correct market failures and compares and contrasts these options. Market-based instruments provide incentives for producers and consumers to reduce or eliminate negative environmental externalities through markets, prices, and other economic means, e.g., Coase Bargaining solutions, cap and trade, taxes, and subsidies. Regulatory-based (command and control) instruments rely on setting a standard, such as emissions or technology adopted, backed by penalties to modify economic behavior. In the absence of government intervention to correct market failures, private sector measures, such as liability, information disclosure, and voluntary agreements, have a role in correcting environmental problems.
In the ethics literature, concern about financial compensation has largely focused on the question of how payment could distort research participants’ perception of risk. Such concern about “undue inducement” has particularly occupied institutional review boards (IRBs) and has often led to conservative judgments about how much financial compensation participants can be offered in exchange for their participation in research. Increasingly, bioethics scholars have argued that such approaches to financial compensation in research could exploit participants, on one hand, or create a barrier to their enrollment, on the other. Despite the vast literature on financial compensation for research, there has been substantially less attention to the potential risk that such payment may pose to research participants. The current system of taxing research compensation is one important example of the financial risks to research participants that warrants more analysis and legislative action.
We present a large scale study where a nationally representative sample of 1000 participants were asked to make real purchases within an online supermarket platform. The study captured the effect of price changes, and of the signposting of such changes, for breakfast cereals and soft drinks. We find that such taxes are an effective means of altering food purchasing, with a 20% rate being sufficient to make a significant impact if (and only if) the tax is signposted. Signposting represents a complementary “nudge” policy that could enhance the impact of the tax, though its effectiveness depends on the product category.
The History of the Franks of Gregory of Tours, along with his Saints’ lives, show a world of cities that maps with surprising accuracy onto the administrative world of late Roman Gaul. The squabbling Merovingian kings treat cities almost as stocks and shares, something of value worth fighting over, valued for their resources and taxes and manpower. From the perspective of Gregory as bishop, he and his fellow bishops play a central role in city administration. Yet they too are descendants of the local land-holding elite, with whom their interests align. The idea that city councils have disappeared is based on a misinterpretation of the senatores, who are simply Gregory’s way of describing the old landed elite who held office in cities. The bishop, as representative of the church and its land-holdings, proves to be the key figure in the adaptation of the old order.
There are many different types of regulatory instruments and tools. Chapter 6 classifies and examines regulatory tools according to their underlying technique or ‘modality’ of control or source of influence, examining five such modalities in turn: command, competition, communication, consensus and code (or ‘architecture’). This chapter also considers algorithmic regulation and the role of reputation as a form of regulation.
Even if a loss or outgoing fulfils the requirements of the general or a specific deduction provision, another provision may expressly deny or limit the deduction available to the taxpayer. For instance, an important provision that limits deductions is s 27-5 ITAA97. As discussed, this section denies a deduction to the extent that a loss or outgoing includes an amount relating to an ITC or a decreasing adjustment under the GST law. This chapter examines a number of other common provisions that deny or limit deductions. These provisions have been enacted for a broad range of policy reasons and are scattered throughout the ITAA36 and ITAA97.
The subjected status of the coloni equalled them to persons alieni iuris, as slaves were too, but they were still free. It made marriages with those not in this way subjected with regard to the transmission of status ‘unequal’. It implies that children follow the status of the mother. This ‘unequal marriage’ and its consequence was introduced by earlier laws. To prevent the children out of marriages of a colonus with a not subjected woman being not subjected, the senatusconsultum Claudianum was applied. That made children follow the status of the father. The abolition of the senatusconsultum led Justinian to introduce the faculty of estate owners to recall coloni from such marriages in order to prevent the loss of labour force. CJ 11.48.19 established that every colonus after thirty years of service was no longer alieni iuris and thus subjected to their estate owner, but free from his control over him and his property. Such coloni are called ‘free’ coloni (coloni liberi). They remained tied to the estate and had to render services and to pay poll tax, but could now fulfill public functions as no longer being of subjected status.
The slow or negative growth rates combined with high rates of inflation in the 1970s led to strong reactions. These reactions would give more power to the market while reducing that of governments. Various economic theories, some new and some rediscovered old ones, were advanced, to call for a reduced government role. Some of these were the Ricardian equivalence, rational expectations, Laffer Curve, efficient markets, effects of high compensations on some individuals, impact of globalization, etc. The new environment made some very conservative politicians win elections, in the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, and some other countries. The era of welfare states was over and that of market fundamentalism had arrived. Future years would be different from past ones. To some exient it would be a return to laissez faire.
The Great Depression introduced doubts in the minds of many about the virtue of a free market economy. The absence of safety nets, at a time when unemployment had reached 25–30 percent, created major difficulties. The need for redistribution and stabilization was felt by many. The changes in the structure of the economies had facilitated tax collection. The new environment led to welfare states with high and growing progressive taxes, high levels of social spending and growing power by labor unions. For a while harmony between the roles of government and state seemed to grow. Then difficulties would begin to appear and to grow over time and this would set the stage for a counterrevolution in later years. Slow growth and growing inflation starting in the late 1960s and continuing in the 1970s would increase the reaction to the welfare policies and to the great power that labor unions had acquired. There would be increasing calls for a return to a growing role by the free market.
In light of ongoing debates about income targeting in the welfare state, this article explores how the design and outcomes of income targeting policies are related to popular targeting preferences. Based on the unique combination of fine-grained opinion and policy indicators in a multilevel analysis, the results show that targeting preferences are indeed empirically related to targeting policies. However, whether these preferences are affected more by the de jure targeting design or the de facto targeting outcome seems to vary between two very different policy domains. In the case of unemployment benefits, the results suggest positive policy feedback: support for high-income targeting increases when unemployment benefits are designed to benefit those with previously higher incomes. For income taxation, by contrast, the results suggest negative policy feedback. In that case, it is not so much the de jure design but rather the de facto outcome that matters: the more taxes effectively work to the advantage of higher-income earners, the less support there is for a tax that levies the same amount on everyone, regardless of income.