Suchergebnisse

Forword -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Account of the Review -- Executive Summary -- Historical Setting of Aboriginal Education in the Northern Territory -- NT Schools Servicing Traditional Aboriginal People -- Bibliography. ; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-70). "Cover title."

English local government finance is part way through a series of major changes that will see its focus shift from being based on redistribution according to spending needs, towards more emphasis on providing financial incentives to tackle needs and increase local revenue-raising capacity. In this context, the government is undertaking a "Fair Funding Review". This is aimed at designing a new system for allocating funding between councils. In particular, the Review will update and improve methods for estimating councils' differing abilities to raise revenues and their differing spending needs. The government is looking for the new system to be simple and transparent, but at the same time robust and evidence based. This paper focuses on the issues that arise in assessing the spending needs of different councils. A companion paper looks at the assessment of revenue-raising capacity, and discusses options for the overall design of the new funding system. [.]

In this report, we provide a detailed overview of Ethiopia's current tax system and the evolution of tax revenue collections over the last 10 years. The report also highlights important changes to the structure of the tax system which have occurred over the past few years, and the associated tax revenue implications. The report is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the composition of tax revenue in Ethiopia, while Section 3 provides a detailed description of the structure of Ethiopia's tax system. Section 4 discusses recent tax policy reforms and the direction of reform in Ethiopia. Section 5 compares tax collections in Ethiopia with those in other sub-Saharan African (SSA) and low- and middle-income countries. We conclude the report in Section 6 by considering the implications of these findings for tax policy strategy and the potential next steps for tax reform.

The 2010s have been a decade of major financial change for English local government. Not only have funding levels - and hence what councils can spend on local services - fallen significantly; major reforms to the funding system have seen an increasing emphasis on using funding to provide financial incentives for development via initiatives such as the Business Rates Retention Scheme (BRRS) and the New Homes Bonus (NHB). Looking ahead, increases in council tax and additional grant funding from central government mean a boost to funding next year - but what about the longer term, especially given plans for further changes to the funding system, including an expansion of the BRRS in 2021-22? This report, the first of what we hope will be an annual series of reports providing an up-to-date analysis of local government, does three things in this context. First, it looks in detail at councils' revenues and spending, focusing on the trends and choices taken over the last decade. Second, it looks at the outlook for local government funding both in the short and longer term. And third, it looks at the impact of the BRRS and NHB on different councils' funding so far, to see whether there are lessons to guide reforms to these policies. The report focuses on those revenue sources and spending areas over which county, district and single-tier councils exercise real control. We therefore exclude spending on police, fire and rescue, national park and education services and the revenues specifically for these services. When looking at trends over time, we also exclude spending on and revenues specifically for public health, and make some adjustments to social care spending to make figures more comparable across years. Public health was only devolved to councils in 2013-14, and the way social care spending is organised has also changed, with councils receiving a growing pot of money from the NHS to help fund services.

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the question of whether additional taxes should be devolved to English local government. The past decade has seen a number of changes to how local government is funded, including the introduction of business rates retention. Broadly, these changes have focused on giving councils more control over their funding and providing stronger financial incentives to councils to drive local growth and development. Devolution of additional tax revenues and powers could be seen as a natural extension of this agenda. After years of cuts, councils in England face serious short-term funding pressures. In the longer term the costs of funding social care are likely to increase faster than the revenues councils receive from council tax and business rates. While these issues could be addressed by using national taxation to increase the grant-funding given to councils, devolution of additional tax revenues and powers could also play a role. This report: looks at the taxes currently devolved to local government in England and in other countries; sets out criteria which can be used to assess whether different taxes and tax powers are in fact suitable for devolution; applies these to a range of taxes; and looks at how much could be raised in different parts of England from different options.

As in high-income countries, reduced rates of VAT and VAT exemptions ("preferential VAT rates") are a common feature of indirect tax systems in LMICs. Many of the goods and services that are granted preferential rates - such as foodstuffs and kerosene - seem likely to receive such treatment on the grounds that they provide a means for the government to indirectly target poorer households, for whom such expenditures may take up a large proportion of their total budget. We use microsimulation methods to estimate the impact of preferential VAT rates in four LMIC countries, considering their effect on revenues, poverty, inequality, and across the consumption distribution. We consider whether other policy tools might be better suited for the pursuit of distributional objectives by estimating the impact of existing cash transfer schemes and a hypothetical scenario where the revenue raised from broadening the VAT base is used to fund a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in each country. We find that although preferential VAT rates reduce poverty, they are not well targeted towards poor households overall. Existing cash transfer schemes are better targeted but would not provide a suitable means of compensation for a broader VAT base given issues related to coverage and targeting mechanisms. Despite being completely untargeted, a UBI funded by the revenue gains from a broader VAT base would create large net gains for poor households and reduce inequality and most measures of extreme poverty in each of the countries studied - even if only 75% of the additional VAT revenue was disbursed as UBI payments. This is the first draft of a paper examining the distributional impacts of VAT exemptions and reduced rates and direct cash (and near-cash) transfer schemes in a series of low and middle income (LMIC) countries. All results presented are preliminary; it is being shared in order to elicit comments and provide early sight of findings we consider robust.