Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：POLICY PRESS  

Contemporary Japan confronts its worst fiscal crisis of the past 50 years. The limits of relying on public debt appear to have been reached, and thus tax increases are returning to the policy-making agenda. But the increases will largely be shaped by the argument that Japan's tax system is too redistributive. Indeed, fiscal policy makers and the political process are already shifting more of the tax burden onto low-income earners. This article refutes the claim that japan's income tax is particularly redistributive, and places the Japanese example in the larger context of globalisation and regressive income tax reforms.

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

Within a few short years, Japan's over \20 trillion system of general subsidies has gone from being a sacred cow to a salient item on a menu of reforms. This development reflects the rise of reformist forces, notably Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, and their critique of the Liberal Democratic Party old guard's extraordinary mismanagement of the Japanese economy. The delegitimation of general subsidies has, however, a longer trajectory as well. It derives from excessive fiscal centralization and the spread of wasteful subsidies throughout the intergovernmental fiscal system. Japan's extensive fiscal reforms in the mid-1980s anticipated a very different scenario. They saw the expansion of general subsidies and locally initiated public works as important means for overcoming the clearly debilitating politics of specific subsidies. What was generally overlooked was the great scope for moral hazard that the reforms entailed. And no one could have foreseen the 1990s, when the central government increasingly force-fed the locals public-works funding as part of its fiscal policy. This paper therefore retraces the political economy of Japan's general subsidy regime and its increasing delegitimation through pork-barrel incentives. It also sketches the current debate over how to reform the system.

DOI： 10.1080/1354786022000007889

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：Japanese   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：Japanese   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：Japanese   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：Japanese   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：Japanese   Publishing type：Research paper (other academic)  

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：Oxford University Press  

This paper examines Japan's 1990s property-tax revolt using Schumpeter's fiscal sociology, or what in contemporary terms could be referred to as an historical institutionalist perspective on fiscal politics. We argue that the revolt was rooted in the wartime fiscal system, whose legacy includes bureaucratic turf wars overtaxes on income, consumption and assets. In recent years, this conflict over access to revenues has been aggravated by a fiscal crisis and major shifts in Japan's national and subnational tax systems. In our view, the activism of Japan's fiscal bureaucrats tends to be dismissed by rational choice institutionalism, especially its principal-agent variant. By contrast, we show that bureaucratic agencies are important, autonomous actors in Japanese fiscal politics, and argue that identifying and explaining their organizational agendas requires more eclectic methods. The public finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society, especially though not exclusively of its political life. The full fruitfulness of this approach is seen particularly at those turning points, or better epochs, during which existing forms begin to die off and to change into something new, and which always involve a crisis of the old fiscal methods. Joseph Schumpeter "The Crisis of the Tax State" (1918). © Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo 1998.

DOI： 10.1093/ssjj/1.2.233

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