The paper proposes a return to a progressive individual based income tax and universal family payments for dependent children, for reasons of both fairness and efficiency, and argues for the elimination of policy instruments that create complexity and serve only to reduce the transparency of tax reform. In the early 1980's Australia had a highly...

This paper examines the question of whether Australia should continue to provide tax concessions amounting to well over $10 billion a year and concludes that it should not. The paper includes a number of suggestions for reform, principally: eliminating the 50 per cent discount; incorporating all pre-1986 assets; deemed realisation of assets on death; and...

This paper considers how asymmetric tax treatment, where labour market earnings are taxed but household production is untaxed, affects educational choice and labour supply in a perfectly competitive labour market. The authors show that taxes on labour market earnings can generate a large (non-marginal) switch to home production and the ensuing deadweight losses are large...

The top tax threshold has not kept pace with the astronomical increases in executive salaries writes Richard Denniss. Until recently, the idea that executive salaries might be ‘too high’ was dismissed as evidence that the proponent didn’t understand how the ‘global market for talent’ works. In the wake of the global financial crisis, however, limiting...

The relationship between income inequality and national savings is theoretically ambiguous, and past empirical studies have delivered mixed results. The authors of this paper revisit the question using a newly available source of data on inequality: the income share of the richest 10 percent and the richest 1 percent. Combining this with historical data on...