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Tax systems worldwide face far-reaching transformations through the implementation of digital technologies. A growing body of academic literature addresses these transformations and explores how digitalisation is affecting the operations and efficiency of revenue agencies, and taxpayer compliance. However, the literature largely ignores the diversified body of research regarding the characteristics, dynamics and determinants of the "fiscal contract". This term describes an implicit agreement between state and both citizen and business taxpayers that associates individual tax compliance and the distribution of the tax burden within a society with public service delivery and access to political decision-making.Fiscal contract theory helps us to understand that taxation is primarily a political – not a technical – issue. But what happens if some technologies cause profound power shifts in the relationship between revenue authorities and taxpayers? Will they trigger the emergence of broad-based, stable fiscal contracts, or might tax system digitalisation increase exclusion and decrease stability? What drives these changes? How do digital technologies in the tax systems of developing countries affect their fiscal contracts?This paper seeks to lay the conceptual groundwork at the intersection of two dynamic academic debates. Based on a thorough review of the literature, it proposes a research framework that combines economic, public management and political science perspectives in order to generate knowledge about institutional, attitudinal and behavioural responses to tax system digitalisation.

Tax systems worldwide face far-reaching transformations through the implementation of digital technologies. A growing body of academic literature addresses these transformations and explores how digitalisation is affecting the operations and efficiency of revenue agencies, and taxpayer compliance. However, the literature largely ignores the diversified body of research regarding the characteristics, dynamics and determinants of the "fiscal contract". This term describes an implicit agreement between state and both citizen and business taxpayers that associates individual tax compliance and the distribution of the tax burden within a society with public service delivery and access to political decision-making. Fiscal contract theory helps us to understand that taxation is primarily a political - not a technical - issue. But what happens if some technologies cause profound power shifts in the relationship between revenue authorities and taxpayers? Will they trigger the emergence of broad-based, stable fiscal contracts, or might tax system digitalisation increase exclusion and decrease stability? What drives these changes? How do digital technologies in the tax systems of developing countries affect their fiscal contracts? This paper seeks to lay the conceptual groundwork at the intersection of two dynamic academic debates. Based on a thorough review of the literature, it proposes a research framework that combines economic, public management and political science perspectives in order to generate knowledge about institutional, attitudinal and behavioural responses to tax system digitalisation.

Bellicist theories of comparative development predict increases in taxation as the result of military rivalries. Others claim that this causal relationship is contingent on particular geographical, institutional, and historical conditions. In this paper, we explore the conditional effects of military rivalries on taxation during the 19th and 20th centuries using time-series cross-section models. We hypothesize that international norms of territoriality, inter-state military alliances, and regime type will condition the direction and magnitude of the effect of rivalries on taxation. Our models suggest that from 1815 to 1945 the effects of rivalry on taxation were insignificant independently of these systemic, dyadic, and institutional factors. However, after 1945 when norms of territorial integrity consolidated, democracies with strong military allies responded to military pressures by lowering taxes in the short-term, reoriented public expenditures towards social spending, and ultimately increased taxes in the long run through a reconfiguration of the fiscal contract. Conversely, autocracies with strong allies responded to military pressures by increasing taxes in the short-term, capturing as much wealth as possible but failing to consolidate durable fiscal institutions.

The paper analyses the course of Dutch financial policy since the demise of Keynesian full employment. How did the public expenditure ratio, the tax burden, and the deficit develop in the last twenty-five years? Why did the government lose control over public spending in the period between 1977 and 1982, even though it proved possible to reduce spending continuously thereafter? Important explanatory variables in this context are economic growth and the ideological orientation of the government. In the 1990s, however, a literature on the common pool resource problem of public budgets developed which emphasizes the impact of the number of actors involved in financial policy-making as well as the institutional design of the budget process for public spending. Combining process tracing and intertemporal comparison, the study demonstrates how fiscal contracts were made and how they were stabilized through the working of the party system. It concludes that if other relevant variables are allowed for, fiscal contracts did have a moderating impact on public spending. ; In dem Papier wird die Finanzpolitik der Niederlande seit dem Ende der keynesianischen Vollbeschäftigungsphase analysiert. Wie haben sich die Staatsquote, die Abgabenquote und das Defizit in den vergangenen 25 Jahren entwickelt? Warum sind die Staatsausgaben in der Phase von 1977 bis 1982 praktisch unkontrolliert gewachsen, wenn es danach gelang, diese kontinuierlich zurück zu führen? Wichtige Erklärungsvariablen sind in diesem Zusammenhang natürlich das Wirtschaftswachstum und die ideologische Ausrichtung der Regierung. In den Neunzigerjahren hat sich eine Literatur zum Allmendeproblem des öffentlichen Haushaltes entwickelt, die zur Erklärung der Entwicklung der Staatsausgaben vor allem auf die Zahl der finanzpolitischen Akteure und die institutionelle Ausgestaltung des Haushaltsprozesses abstellt. Durch eine Kombination von Prozessanalyse und intertemporalen Vergleich wird gezeigt, wie finanzpolitische Vereinbarungen zu Stande kamen und wie sie durch die Funktionsweise des Parteiensystems stabilisiert wurden. Schließlich wird belegt, dass die in Koalitionsabkommen niedergelegten finanzpolitischen Absprachen unter Kontrolle anderer wichtiger Erklärungsvariablen einen mäßigenden Einfluss auf die Entwicklung der Staatsquote hatten.

For decades, taxation has featured centrally on the international development agenda. In the 1990s, tax reforms to modernise tax systems were implemented under the auspices of international financial institutions. In the 2000s, taxation became linked to good governance, and in 2015, the Addis Action Agenda made taxation an integral part of the effort of reaching the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Based on European state-building narratives, taxation is expected to enhance societies' political engagement around the use of tax revenues and to make states more accountable, leading to a fiscal contract. This dissertation studies this expectation in the case of Senegal. It asks whether, how and under what conditions taxation features in state-society accountability relations in Senegal, focussing specifically on the argument applied by societal actors demanding accountability from the state. With an interpretive approach and based on extensive fieldwork, interview data and a survey with informal, economic actors in Dakar, the dissertation finds that taxation only features to a limited extent. Where taxation does feature, its meaning is shaped by prominent institutional features of state-society accountability relations in Senegal such as network-based and electoral accountabilities. Theoretically, these findings provide important nuances to the fiscal contract theory that led to a reconceptualisation of the fiscal contract into two distinct concepts. Above all, the dissertation highlights the imperative of taking into consideration the contextual conditions that shape state-society accountability relations, the meaning of taxation and, hence, the potential and actual role of taxation in prompting more accountable governance.

The objective of this paper is to analyse how contractual stabilization devices have evolved since the late 1990s, based on a survey of 20 countries and a review of the literature and evidence on stabilization clauses. Although fiscal stability is a commonly cited attribute of a desirable upstream petroleum regime, one of the commonly observed features of existing regimes is the lack of stability. The paper studies the major triggers that push host governments to revise the fiscal terms to which they originally agreed with investors; amongst various economic and political factors, one of the obvious drivers is the oil price. Chasing the price of oil, however, is a burdensome and inefficient strategy, as oil is an internationally traded commodity where short-term price volatility is the norm. The paper's three broad conclusions include: First, classical stabilization models have not been successful in practice; Second, the more modern clauses are more likely to treat changes in fiscal terms symmetrically, and may be equally beneficial to governments and oil companies; Third, modern stabilization clauses can allow policymakers to consider the overall tax system and its impact on revenue and growth, without worrying about the specific impact on the oil and gas sector, and without penalizing investors in the sector. Fiscal stability clauses in developing countries will remain a key feature of contractual agreements and oil and gas laws for years to come. However, the effectiveness of the more modern clauses in achieving the desired outcome remains as questionable as that of previous stability models, particularly in countries which continue to lack the administrative capability to enforce these mechanisms, and where government policy in general and investment laws and the judiciary in particular lack credibility.

The concept of fiscal credibility is a watermark of some of the fiscal policy literature, but beyond an intuitive parallel with monetary policy, it remains not well defined, nor measured. This paper provides an explicit measure of fiscal credibility, based on the anchoring of private expectations onto official targets. I document how credibility varies among a sample of 26 European countries and evolves over 1995-2019. I find that private agents do not trust all governments uniformly. Country differences are mainly driven by past fiscal performance and institutions (fiscal rules and councils). Conversely, I find that credibility impacts sovereign financing conditions, as well as macroeconomic performance. Governments should thus strive to be (à la Rousseau) or appear (à la Machiavelli) credible.

The concept of fiscal credibility is a watermark of some of the fiscal policy literature, but beyond an intuitive parallel with monetary policy, it remains not well defined, nor measured. This paper provides an explicit measure of fiscal credibility, based on the anchoring of private expectations onto official targets. I document how credibility varies among a sample of 26 European countries and evolves over 1995-2019. I find that private agents do not trust all governments uniformly. Country differences are mainly driven by past fiscal performance and institutions (fiscal rules and councils). Conversely, I find that credibility impacts sovereign financing conditions, as well as macroeconomic performance. Governments should thus strive to be (à la Rousseau) or appear (à la Machiavelli) credible.

Stringent fiscal rules and budgetary procedures might generate incentives for political decision-makers to cut predominantly productive public investment during periods of fiscal consolidation. While the influence of the European Stability and Growth Pact on public investment received a lot of attention in the empirical literature, only a few studies consider the impact of different budgetary decision-making rules and procedures at the national level on government investment spending. We test empirically for the effect of political factors and the institutional framework of budgeting on public investment in EU 15 over the period 1990-2005. Our results show that stringent quantitative constraints limit government investment, but a centralisation of budgeting procedures by providing more agenda setting powers to the finance minister (delegation approach) or by the use of medium-term fiscal contracts are not related to public investment spending cuts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the economy, including the taxation sector. This tumultuous period for taxpayers and the Government can be a golden opportunity to transform the system and institutional governance to create a firm foundation for increasing tax compliance and by extension, tax revenue. This paper examines strategies that are necessary to face spate of changes and uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as laying the framework for post COVID-19 reality that is characterized by sustainable tax compliance. The results of this study reached the conclusion that the basic concept of the relationship between the Government and taxpayers as a social contract or fiscal contract should underpin the three phases of the formulation of changes in tax policy. For changes to have long-term and sustainable impact, there is need to strike a balance between the three pillars in tax administration, namely, enforcement, facilitation, and trust.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to the Department of Public Safety's proposed contract with the North Texas Tollway Authority and Department reimbursements for all costs associated with providing the services required in the contract.

This paper presents a holistic picture of a major operation undertaken by Sweden at the start of the seventeenth century to recruit foreign troops to fight in its wars. For this purpose, empirical data has been collected for all of the thirty-two identified recruitments undertaken between 1605–1610 from Western Europe. This data includes previously studied cases as well as hitherto overlooked French recruitments. Analysis of the multiple recruitments is broken down into three parallel processes - military, financial and diplomatic - which are looked at separately, and together. The focus is on recruitment via Älvsborg - Sweden's sole North Sea port and fiscal-military bottleneck for the operation - from the British Isles, the Netherlands and France, comparing the recruitment from these different regions within the same operational framework. This integrated approach permits a more comprehensive study of Swedish recruitments than previous regional studies have allowed. Recruitment was dependent on international military, economic and social networks, as well as reliable and efficient partners that knew how to operate them. This paper argues that, although the preference was to use established networks, success of the delicate operation required adaptability and the capacity to renew existing ties and forge new ones. Building trust and reliability was crucial, since these attributes were needed to overcome many of the problems faced by recruiters. To arrive at this goal, a combination of contractual standardisation, operational streamlining and external guarantors were employed. ; Peer reviewed

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Federal interagency contract service programs are being used in a wide variety of situations, from those in which a single agency provides limited contracting assistance to an approach in which the provider agency's contracting officer handles all aspects of the procurement. This increased use of interagency contracts is a result of reforms and legislation passed in the 1990s, allowing agencies to streamline the acquisition process, operate more like businesses, and offer increasing numbers of services to other agencies. Most of the contract service programs GAO reviewed reported an excess of revenues over costs in at least one year between fiscal years 1999 and 2001. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance directs agencies with governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWAC) or franchise fund programs to account for and recover fully allocated actual costs and to report on their financial results. Agencies are to identify all direct and indirect costs and charge fees to ordering agencies based on these costs. However, some GWAC programs have not identified or accurately reported the full cost of providing interagency contract services. OMB's guidance further directs that agencies return GWAC earnings to the miscellaneous receipts account of the U.S. Treasury's General Fund. However, this guidance conflicts with the operations of agencies' revolving funds, which were established by statutes that allow retention of excess revenues. The Federal Supply Schedules program has generated hefty earnings, largely because of the rapid growth of information technology sales. Rather than adjust the fee, however, the General Services Administration has used the earnings primarily to support its stock and fleet programs. However, the significant amount of earnings means that Federal Supply Schedules program customers are being consistently overcharged for the contract services they are buying."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "DOE is the largest civilian-contracting agency in the federal government, and relies primarily on contractors to operate its sites and carry out its diverse missions. For fiscal year 2003, DOE will spend about 90 percent of its total annual budget, or $19.8 billion, on contracts, including $9.4 billion to operate 16 of its research laboratories (called federally funded research and development centers). Since 1990, GAO has identified DOE's contract management as high-risk for fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. In 1994, DOE began reforming its contracting practices to, among other things, improve contractor performance and accountability. As part of that effort, DOE has at times used competition in awarding contracts to manage and operate its research laboratories. In September 2002, GAO reported on the status of contract reform efforts in DOE. (Contract Reform: DOE Has Made Progress, but Actions Needed to Ensure Initiatives Have Improved Results) (Sep. 2002, GAO-02-798) This testimony discusses some of the findings in that report. GAO was asked to testify on DOE's rationale for deciding whether to compete a laboratory research contract, the extent to which DOE has competed these contracts, and the role of competition and other mechanisms in improving contractor performance."

This paper uses a new data set on budgetary institutions in Europe to examine the impact of fiscal rules and budget procedures in EU countries on public finances. It briefly describes the main pattern of budgetary institutions and their determinants across the EU 15 member states. Empirical evidence for the time period 1985-2004 suggests that the centralisation of budgeting procedures restrains public debt. In countries with one-party governments or coalition governments where parties are closely aligned and where political competition among them is low, this is achieved by the delegation of decision-making power to the minister of finance. Fiscal contracts that require countries to set multi-year targets and that reinforce those targets increase fiscal discipline in countries with ideologically dispersed coalitions and where parties regularly compete against each other.