Australian business income tax reform in retrospect: An analytical perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Looking back on the evolution of taxation reform in developed economies over the post-war period, we observe that the early decades were marked by a determined effort to implement reforms based on Haig-Simons principles of a comprehensive income taxation. Under this approach all the various types and sources of capital income (as well as labour income) would be taxed alike, tax rates could be lowered, and inefficiency and associated inequity would thereby be kept to a minimum. Despite far-reaching recommendations by expert bodies in Canada, the US Treasury, Ireland, and Australia, achievements in the taxation of capital or business income have in all countries fallen far short of the ideal. Indeed, capital income can now clearly be seen as the Achilles Heel of income taxation, which continually threatens to bring down the whole structure. In the face of apparently intractable obstacles to implementation at the political level, support for comprehensive income taxation has progressively been undermined to the point where many tax economists now accept that any attempt to tax capital income in accordance with Haig-Simons principles should be abandoned. We strongly believe, however, that these arguments are completely misguided, as post-war experience with company income taxation in Australia and elsewhere amply serves to demonstrate. The company income tax provides the cornerstone of the capital or business income tax system. This paper focuses on Australian experience with the corporate tax and considers the range of options being considered by policy-makers, including Nordic-style dual income taxation and a return to classical company and shareholder taxation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".