Stefan Traub

Almost all advanced democracies have launched significant privatization programs over the last three decades. However, while there was a global run into privatization, substantial cross-national differences in the divesture of state-owned enterprises can be observed. This book focuses on the political economy of privatization, and addresses the questions 'What are the driving forces behind this development and how can the variation be explained?' which are of both theoretical and empirical interest. While the topic itself is not new, the existing comparative literature on the political economy of privatization suffers from at least two major shortcomings: First, recent macro-quantitative analysis in political science and economics has only focused on material privatization; formal privatization has hitherto been neglected due to an absence of data, even though this type of privatization is of eminent relevance in the public utility sectors. Second, most of the empirical studies in this area treat countries as independent units. In reality, however, policy decisions are likely to be interdependent. Policy decisions taken in one country influence the decision-making process in others. Given these shortcomings in the existing literature, the idea of this volume is to supply a fresh and comprehensive overview of the political economy of privatization using a new data set, the REST database. The empirical analysis covers 20 OECD countries in the period between 1980 and the advent of the global economic crisis in 2008. The recent economic crisis provides a good opportunity to take stock of the changing role of government in economic over the last three decades.

? This is the first book that performs international and intertemporal comparisons of uniform tax progression with empirical data. While conventional measures of tax progression suffer from serious disadvantages for empirical analyses, this book extends uniform measures to progression comparisons of countries with different income distributions. Tax progression is analyzed in terms of Lorenz curve and Suits curve equivalents of net incomes and taxes. The authors derive six distinct definitions of the relation "is more progressive than", which are then utilized for an empirical analysis of 13 countries included in the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). In two thirds of all international comparisons of tax progression, the authors report a clear ranking of the respective countries in terms of progression dominance. Tax based definitions of greater progressivity perform best. These observations are yet reinforced by statistical tests. The book also provides an account of the institutional background of the involved countries in order to facilitate the interpretation of the data. Moreover, the authors conduct intertemporal comparisons of tax progression for selected countries and perform a sensitivity analysis with respect to the parameterization of the equivalence scale.

? This is the first book that performs international and intertemporal comparisons of uniform tax progression with empirical data. While conventional measures of tax progression suffer from serious disadvantages for empirical analyses, this book extends uniform measures to progression comparisons of countries with different income distributions. Tax progression is analyzed in terms of Lorenz curve and Suits curve equivalents of net incomes and taxes. The authors derive six distinct definitions of the relation "is more progressive than", which are then utilized for an empirical analysis of 13 countries included in the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). In two thirds of all international comparisons of tax progression, the authors report a clear ranking of the respective countries in terms of progression dominance. Tax based definitions of greater progressivity perform best. These observations are yet reinforced by statistical tests. The book also provides an account of the institutional background of the involved countries in order to facilitate the interpretation of the data. Moreover, the authors conduct intertemporal comparisons of tax progression for selected countries and perform a sensitivity analysis with respect to the parameterization of the equivalence scale.

On October 24th, 1994, the pro-government German newspaper 'Die Welt' reported that the Minister of Family Affairs, Mrs. Hannelore Ransch, member of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CD U), withdrew her candidacy for a second term after serving a four year term. While Chancellor Helmut Kohl and other party colleagues officially expressed their regret for this move, the conservative press openly announced their relief. A symbolic photo of Ransch was published together with the article: In the background, two direction indicators are discernable, one pointing to the 'emergency exit' and the other to the 'escape route'. What led up to this state of affairs? Some months before, Ransch had triggered off a storm of public indignation due to her proposal to partly re­ place the present German child-benefit system by 'tax fines for the childless'. To be exact, the minister's idea was to distinctly increase child allowance and child benefit, and to bill childless families for this measure, that is, childless couples and singles should have to payoff a tax surcharge christened 'Zu­ kunftsbeitrag' (,contribution to the future'). However, only the second part of her proposal, the tax fine, made it to the headlines (compare, for exam­ ple, 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung', February 19th, 1994, and 'Die Welt', March 28th, 1994).