The Harmer–Henry pension and tax review resulted in an increase in the common value of the single rate of Age Pension and Disability Support Pension from 25 per cent to 28 per cent of male total average weekly earnings. It also recommended a Resource Super Profits Tax that would have initially taxed mining ‘rents' at 36 per cent, on top of the pre-existing 30 per cent federal tax on profits. These recommendations represent two sides of the same coin: higher federal spending alongside higher federal taxes. The pension rise is likely to reduce participation in the labour force. The proposed tax rise would discourage mining activity as miners considered their options to delay or abandon projects. There is a lot to like at the level of detail in the Harmer–Henry package, but future efforts to reform our tax-transfer system should focus on promoting saving and investment, including investment in human capital.

Green New Deals are being widely discussed as both a means to confront climate change and to improve aspects of social well-being. An important facet of the discussion is how they should be financed. The negative impacts of Covid-19 on national budgets and sovereign debt question whether the implementation of Green New Deals is feasible if austerity needs to be introduced to achieve sustainability. This article assesses whether a wealth tax based upon the work of Michal Kalecki could help avoid austerity measures and facilitate the introduction of Green New Deals. While wealth taxes have traditionally been defined on net worth or assets to reduce wealth inequality, the formulation is meant to be equitable by applying to gross wealth or assets. Estimates are calculated for the United States and turn out to be quite modest. The approach not only generates revenue to cover expected net interest outlays on national debt, but additional revenue to pay down portions of it and/or support green initiatives, such as Biden’s de-carbonisation policy. The article concludes with a discussion of challenges for the tax’s effectiveness.

The ambiguous phenomenon of corruption has long been the cause of great theoretical debate in economics. By using Structural Equation Modelling, with the two types of corruption as a latent variable, this paper employs causal and indicative variables to the Latin American region to test for rent seeking and systemic corruption during 1980–2018. The findings provide evidence for two types of corruption, one generated by greed, and the other a solution to market failures. Such results support the view that corruption encompasses a complex set of social behaviours that may require a stronger definitional approach.

Left-leaning and right-leaning governments hold opposing views on economic policy, resulting in disparities in economic behaviours and outcomes. Given this context, we explore the effect of political ideology on domestic credit using an unbalanced panel data of 29 countries from 1960 to 2014. Our empirical analysis shows that left-leaning governments reduce total domestic credit allocations. Also, we find that right-leaning governments provide more credit to the private sector, while left-leaning governments prefer to boost domestic credit to the public sector. In a further analysis, we show that political parties and their domestic credit strategies remain unchanged even during electoral periods. Our novel insights, that are robust to alternative measures, samples, and a set of econometric identifications, contribute to the literature on partisan politics and lending behaviour.

In 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finalized its rear visibility regulation, which requires cameras in all new vehicles, with the goal of allowing drivers to see what is behind them and thus reducing backover accidents. In 2018, the Trump administration embraced the regulation. The rear visibility rule raises numerous puzzles. First, Congress’ grant of authority was essentially standardless – perhaps the most open-ended in all of federal regulatory law. Second, it is not easy to identify a market failure to justify the regulation. Third, the monetized costs of the regulation greatly exceeded the monetized benefits, and yet on welfare grounds, the regulation can plausibly be counted as a significant success. Rearview cameras produce a set of benefits that are hard to quantify, including increased ease of driving, and those benefits might have been made a part of “breakeven analysis,” accompanying standard cost-benefit analysis. In addition, rearview cameras significantly improve the experience of driving, and it is plausible to think that in deciding whether to demand them, many vehicle purchasers did not sufficiently anticipate that improvement. This is a problem of limited foresight; rearview cameras are “experience goods.” A survey conducted in 2019 strongly supports this proposition, finding that about 56 % of consumers would demand at least $300 to buy a car without a rearview camera, and that fewer than 6 % would demand $50 or less. Almost all of that 6 % consists of people who do not own a car with a rearview camera. (The per-person cost is usually under $50.) These conclusions have general implications for other domains in which regulation has the potential to improve social welfare, even if it fails standard cost-benefit analysis; the defining category involves situations in which people lack experience with a good whose provision might have highly beneficial welfare effects.

Executive control of government is generally not a long-term job. In such cases, relatively short executive tenure should be expected to play an important role in determining the degree to which policymakers internalize the future costs associated with their current fiscal behavior. The effects of policymaker's expected planning horizons on macroeconomic outcomes, however, have been difficult to model outside of a fixed term limit context due to the unobserved likelihood of remaining in office, along with potential endogeneity problems where re-election campaigns can be enhanced with generous, deficit-financed expenditures in election years. From a globally representative sample of 79 countries over a 32-year period (1980–2012), this paper provides empirical evidence suggesting that incumbent governments who know that will not be in office in the following period with a probability of one, are found to generate significantly higher deficits in a linear discounting model, and are found to produce the least responsible fiscal outcomes where the likelihood of re-election is around fifty percent in quadratic discounting models.

The global banking system can be shown to be a Complex Adaptive System that exhibits phase transitions from time to time. These phase transitions can result in significant financial losses to the community that we estimate to be much more significant than losses occurring during “business as usual” periods. In this paper, we argue that the significant losses arising from phase transitions in the banking system requires a very different approach to regulation than the current Basel regime, and that there is a need to transition the Basel regime from a Federation of Systems to a System of Systems. We demonstrate that the World Health Organisation’s recent management system for pandemics is ideally suited for management of the global banking system and would have greater potential to control the phase transition losses than the current Basel system.

Two competing explanations for why consumers have trouble with financial decisions are gaining momentum. One is that people are financially illiterate since they lack understanding of simple economic concepts and cannot carry out computations such as computing compound interest, which could cause them to make suboptimal financial decisions. A second is that impatience or present-bias might explain suboptimal financial decisions. That is, some people persistently choose immediate gratification instead of taking advantage of larger long-term payoffs. We use experimental evidence from Chile to explore how these factors appear related to poor financial decisions. Our results show that our measure of impatience is a strong predictor of wealth and investment in health. Financial literacy is also correlated with wealth though it appears to be a weaker predictor of sensitivity to framing in investment decisions. Policymakers interested in enhancing retirement well-being would do well to consider the importance of both factors.

The estimated impacts, benefits, and costs of legalizing slot machines in Maryland are analyzed building on and contrasting with results from an impact analysis. The analysis provides estimates of the components and the total net benefits to the state and its citizens; the role of uncertainty, distributional impacts, and a basic tax alternative. The results forecast mostly positive net benefits for Maryland both in comparison to doing nothing and in comparison to raising an equivalent amount in taxes. However, if slot revenue raised from the lower income population is given more weight, then doing nothing or raising taxes appears to be preferred.

Preliminary molecular data obtained from one mitochondrial (COI) and one nuclear marker (H3) from the available species of the genus Okenia have revealed a new cryptic species of this genus. The new species (Okenia harastii sp. nov.), from New South Wales (NSW) eastern Australia, has a light brown body with scattered dark brown and white spots of different sizes, and six pairs of translucent mantle processes. Okenia harastii sp. nov. is compared with other Okenia species from NSW and with other morphologically similar species.

This article deals with the relations between taxation and prices levels in seventeenth century Castile through an analysis of the influence of royal and municipal taxes on the retail prices of cheap wine in Madrid between 1606 and 1700. First part describes the taxes levied on cheap wine by the Castilian Crown and the town council in Madrid. Both kinds of taxes provided the Royal and the City Treasuries with the most important part of their tax revenues. Second part analyzes how the Royal and the city authorities estimated the monetary value of the taxes and excises levied on this beverage. Lastly, third part shows that the burden of the royal and municipal taxes levied on a litre of cheap wine rose during the period. If in 1606-10 both types of taxes amounted to around 30 per cent of the retail prices of a litre of cheap wine, in the last third of the century this percentage had risen to 60-65 per cent.

According to the “public capital hypothesis” public investment crowds in private investment by increasing the rate of return to private capital. The present paper uses an extended cost function with public capital included as an unpaid fixed factor of production to examine the impact public capital has on the private economy. Using a panel of four highly aggregated sectors of the West German Economy, it is shown, that the provision of public capital raises the demand for private capital, as suggested by the public capital hypothesis. In addition, it is shown that public infrastructure capital contributes to the productivity of the private economy.