This report argues that the key to progressive tax reform is to strengthen the personal income tax system and puts forward a set of benchmarks and options for reform. These will be used by ACOSS to evaluate the proposals of the Government’s Australia’s Future Tax System (AFTS) Review after its report is finalised later this...

Taxing investment earnings on pension assets could bring in an extra $90 billion over the next 15 years, which could be used to make the system fairer, writes Michael Rice.

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...

Cross country comparisons of lifecycle labour supplies show that female hours of market work are significantly lower in Australia than in other comparable OECD countries, notably, the US, UK and Sweden. This paper argues that an explanation can be found in the rate structure of the Australian family income tax system, in combination with a...

This paper presents the results of research undertaken in the Productivity Commission’s Environment and Resource Economics Branch during 2005. It is part of a larger suite of water policy research conducted by the Commission, including modelling of regional economic impacts of changes in water trade within the southern Murray–Darling Basin.