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"Latvia and the European Union" published on by Oxford University Press.

Published online: 29 August 2017 ; The paper analyses Latvian economic policy during the period 2008-2014 when the country was simultaneously subject to three European Union (EU) economic governance frameworks - the European Semester, the Balance-of-Payments programme and the Maastricht convergence criteria (for euro adoption). Through in-depth process tracing based on public policy documents, interviews with senior officials in Riga and Brussels and the press, the paper finds that the Latvian government cherry-picked and instrumentalized EU economic policy targets and overachieved in them. In contrast to the literature depicting the European Commission as a neoliberal actor which systematically undermines social protection, the paper shows that against the backdrop of fiscally austere national authorities, the Commission instead played the role of social policy advocate, repeatedly calling for stronger measures to help the poor. Shedding light on the limits of one-size-fits-all governance, the findings of the Latvian case have significant implications for EU economic governance more generally.

This article describes the new Tax Introduction Dataset (TID). Listing the year and the mode of the first permanent introduction of six major taxes (inheritance tax, personal income tax, corporate income tax, social security contributions, general sales tax and value added tax) in 220 countries, 1750–2018, TID is the most comprehensive dataset of its kind. The comprehensiveness of our measure is of critical value to empirical work on the causes of tax innovation and its consequences for state, society and economy. In this paper, we explain the selection of our tax sample and the structure of the dataset, descriptively map temporal and regional patterns of tax introductions around the world, and draw on TID to investigate associations between tax introductions and economic development, war, and democratization.