Book Chapter
National Taxation, Fiscal Federalism, and Global Taxation

This chapter, together with chs. 2 and 10, approaches the question of development funding in a theoretical way, rather than by examining individual proposals for sources. One purpose of the book is to bring to bear on this accumulated knowledge in the field of national public finance, and more generally public economics. This chapter looks at the lessons to be learned from the fiscal federalism literature. It highlights some of the similarities and some of the differences between fiscal institutions in federations and those that might apply in a global setting, and draws a number of conclusions about sources of new revenues for development, dealing specifically with taxes on nations, taxes on global externalities, and taxes on internationally mobile tax bases. The three main sections of the chapter look at: revenue‐raising in a federal setting – assignment of revenue‐raising authority, intergovernmental transfers, cooperative behaviour by subnational governments, and freeriding by subnational governments; revenue‐raising in federations with no central government – non‐cooperative and cooperative subnational redistribution; and the implications for global revenue sources – taxes on nations (a global equalisation scheme), taxes on international externalities, and taxes on internationally mobile tax bases.