Broad-Based Consumption Tax Reform: The Economics and Politics of Its Equity Implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is a widely accepted view amongst fiscal economists that a general consumption tax should be structured with the widest possible base and a single positive rate. A major obstacle, though, is the instinctive public reaction and the consequential political response arising from concerns that a broad-based consumption tax is regressive and imposes a burden ill-afforded by the poor. This paper investigates the reasons why the New Zealand and Singapore tax reforms were successful in introducing consumption taxes (i.e. the Goods and Services Tax) with the desired comprehensive base intact, whereas Canada and Australia compromised on their original commitments to a broad base by zero-rating food and other essentials. The paper presents the economic and political perspectives of the equity implications of broad-based consumption tax reform and sets out the roles and normative attributes of policy measures to compensate for these equity effects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".