Consumption Taxation in the European Economic Community: Fostering the Common Market or Financing the Welfare State?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The literature on the comparative political economy of taxation often links consumption taxation to the welfare state. It argues that the expansion of consumption taxation paid for the expansion of welfare states and that bigger welfare states therefore tax consumption more heavily. We challenge this perspective by looking at the introduction of the Value Added Tax (VAT) in the European Economic Community in 1967, the breakthrough of this form of consumption taxation. Studying the crucial case of Germany, and complementing it with the shadow case of the Netherlands, we demonstrate that political struggles about this reform did not center on a conflict between supporters and opponents of welfare state expansion. Instead, the VAT was primarily a tool to foster market integration in Europe by reducing barriers to trade. As we show, the coalition in support of the VAT only succeeded after it won the backing of important export interests.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".