Tax Politics in Eastern Europe

"This is the first book to systematically examine the variation in policies of Eastern European countries. There is a theoretical contribution to understandings of variation in tax policies, but just as impressive is the in-depth empirical analysis and in particular the data from interviews with key players in the process." --Yoshiko Herrera, University of Wisconsin-Madison Hilary Appel analyzes the domestic and international factors that drive tax policy in Eastern Europe, beginning with a review of the greatest challenges in the initial creation of the capitalist tax systems, then turning to the evolution of specific tax forms in order to gauge the relative impact of domestic politics on tax policy. One might assume that the domestic political stakes should be especially high since post-Communist tax reform requires not merely a simple adjustment at the margin, but the fundamental reallocation of the responsibility for government revenue. Appel concludes, however, that although some tax areas, such as personal income taxes, remain politicized, most other taxes, such as corporate income taxes and all forms of consumption taxes, have been less subject to domestic political pressures because of powerful constraints from regional and global economic integration.