Why Don't We Tax the Rich? Inequality, Legislative Malapportionment, and Personal Income Taxation around the World

Martin Ardanaz () and Carlos Scartascini

No 3821, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: This paper argues that the details of political institutions help explain the low levels of personal income taxation. In particular, legislative malapportionment enables rich elites to exercise disproportionate political influence. Because over-represented districts tend to be dominated by parties aligned with the elite, these groups can block legislative attempts to introduce progressive taxes. Using a sample of more than 50 countries (including 17 across Latin America) between 1990 and 2007, this paper finds that i) countries with historically more unequal distributions of wealth and income systematically present higher levels of legislative malapportionment, and ii) higher levels of malapportionment are associated with lower shares of personal income taxes in GDP. present higher levels of legislative malapportionment, and ii) higher levels of malapportionment are associated with lower shares of personal income taxes in GDP.

Keywords: Personal income tax; Inequality; Malapportionment; Elite dominance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D78 H24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... around-the-World.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Why Don’t We Tax the Rich? Inequality, Legislative Malapportionment, and Personal Income Taxation around the World (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:3821

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().