The Administrative Foundations of the Chinese Fiscal State


Book Description

"China's staggering economic growth in the last 40 years is one of the most fascinating and important stories of social change in recent world history. Social scientists from around the globe have produced vast literatures to explore the story's countless dimensions. Invariably, the government's actions lie at the center of the narratives that emerge. The Chinese state nurtured the early growth of private entrepreneurship in township and village enterprises. It made dazzling investments in infrastructure projects and is responsible for a model of investment-led economic growth that dominates to the present day. It has tried, although with various degrees of success, to either build or revamp gigantic systems of public education and public health, of old-age, medical, and unemployment insurance, and of poverty assistance. China has, of course, also expanded its military power and foreign operations. To do all these and many other things, the Chinese government has had to accumulate and deploy vast amounts of social resources. Certainly, it has done so partly by exercising control over the nation's banking sector, manipulating its capital markets, and owning large quantities of productive assets through state-owned enterprises. Yet these forms of state ownership and state control are dwarfed by the government's most important access to social resources: the power of taxation"--




The Administrative Foundations of the Chinese Fiscal State


Book Description

First systematic study of Chinese taxation, applying novel legal and economic analyses - an essential reference on the subject.




The Administrative Foundations of the Chinese Fiscal State


Book Description

On subjects ranging from trade to democratization, there has lately been a wave of laments about China's development belying Western expectations. Yet these disappointments often come with misunderstandings of the very institutions that China was expected to adopt. Chinese taxation offers a sharp illustration. When China introduced a tax system suited for the market economy, it fully intended tax collection to rely on self-assessment, audits, and the rule of law. But this Western approach was quickly jettisoned in favour of one that emphasized monitoring of taxpayers and ex ante interventions, at the expense of deterrence and truthful reporting norms. The Chinese approach surprisingly matches recommendations made by recent economic scholarship on tax compliance and state capacity. China's massive but little-known explorations in taxation highlight the distinct types of modern state capacity, and raise challenging questions about the future of taxation and the superiority of institutions based on rule of law.




The Rise of Fiscal States


Book Description

Leading economic historians present a groundbreaking series of country case studies exploring the formation of fiscal states in Eurasia.




Taxation, Citizenship and Democracy in the 21st Century


Book Description

Proposing innovative ideas on the links between taxation, citizenship and democracy, this multidisciplinary book contributes to ongoing research and scholarship by emphasizing the importance of taxes to the functioning of democracy.




Tax and Government in the 21st Century


Book Description

A broad, accessible, evidence-based analysis of tax law and how democratic tax states are confronting today's global digital challenges.




A Journey Through European and International Taxation


Book Description

To some extent, because of his overlapping careers in academia and politics, the renowned tax scholar Peter Essers is known for his influential insight that ‘the effects of taxation on the political balance of power, and vice versa, are always interlinked with other phenomena, such as wars, crises, religious developments and inequalities in society’. In this widely ranging festschrift, thirty-six prominent tax scholars from all across Europe examine the legacy of Peter Essers’ research interests, from the larger philosophical, political, and social factors driving tax history to the reality of the taxing State as experienced by taxpayers and tax officials. The book’s outstanding overview of the most relevant technical and policy aspects of European and international taxation includes deeply thoughtful chapters on such topics and issues as the following: developing sustainable corporate tax governance; tax whistleblowing; transfer pricing; balancing qualitative and quantitative approaches to tax research; necessity to reach something close to ‘equal treatment’ between the upper and lower social classes; consent and democracy; tax rebellions; tax evasion and tax avoidance; taxation of cross-border remote workers and their employers; mitigation of double taxation of income earned by entertainers and sportspersons; and the international tax treaty network. More than a homage to this scholar’s far-reaching contributions, this book is remarkable for the variety and academic rigour of the chapters. The understanding its authors provide of both the broad contours and the intricacies of European and international taxation will be of inestimable value to tax practitioners, policymakers, tax consultants, and academics, as well as interested researchers in economics, political science, and sociology.




The Political Economy of Making and Implementing Social Policy in China


Book Description

This book explores the institutional factors in social policymaking and implementation in China. From the performance evaluation system for local cadres to the intergovernmental fiscal system, local policy experimentation, logrolling among government departments, and the “top-level” design, there are a number of factors that make policy in China less than straightforward. The book argues that it is bureaucratic incentive structure lead to a fragmented and stratified welfare system in China. Using a variety of Chinese- and English-language sources, including central and local government documents, budgetary data, household surveys, media databases, etc., this book covers the development of China’s pensions, health insurance, unemployment insurance, and social assistance programs since the 1990s, with a focus on initiatives since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Providing a deeper understanding of policymaking and implementation in China, this book interests scholars of public administration, political economy, Asian politics, and social development.




War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe


Book Description

There is a common belief that the system of sovereign territorial states and the roots of liberal democracy are unique to European civilization and alien to non-Western cultures. The view has generated popular cynicism about democracy promotion in general and China's prospect for democratization in particular. This book demonstrates that China in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (656-221 BC) consisted of a system of sovereign territorial states similar to Europe in the early modern period. It examines why China and Europe shared similar processes but experienced opposite outcomes.




Culture, Power, and the State


Book Description

In the early twentieth century, the Chinese state made strenuous efforts to broaden and deepen its authority over rural society. This book is an ambitious attempt to offer both a method and a framework for analyzing Chinese social history in the state-making era. The author constructs a prismatic view of village-level society that shows how marketing, kinship, water control, temple patronage, and other structures of human interaction overlapped to form what he calls the cultural nexus of power in local society. The author's concept of the cultural nexus and his tracing of how it was altered enables us for the first time to grapple with change at the village level in all its complexity. The author asserts that the growth of the state transformed and delegitimized the traditional cultural nexus during the Republican era, particularly in the realm of village leadership and finances. Thus, the expansion of state power was ultimately and paradoxically responsible for the revolution in China as it eroded the foundations of village life, leaving nothing in its place. The problems of state-making in China were different from those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; the Chinese experience heralds the process that would become increasingly common in the emergent states of the developing world under the very different circumstances of the twentieth century.