This paper builds a new microdatabase that covers 100 countries at all income levels and long-run time series in the United States (1870–2010) and Mexico ( 1960–2010) to document how the modern tax system arises over development. I establish a new set of stylized facts, which show that the income tax exemption threshold decreases in the income distribution as a country develops, tracking growth in the employee share of employment that occurs gradually further down the income distribution. Additional evidence supports the interpretation that the rise in third-party covered income through increases in employee share drives expansions of the income tax base over development.

The empirical economics literature on taxation in developing countries has centered on the importance of third-party information for enforcement. Yet, while surely a long-run objective, leveraging such information remains out of reach in many developing countries due to largely informal economies and low state capacity. This article examines an emerging complementary literature focused on strengthening the “sinews” of state capacity: tax administration. We argue that reforms to the organizational structure, personnel management, and task management of tax authorities have potential to raise tax capacity in developing countries. We also argue that efforts to improve the state’s legitimacy—popular acceptance of its right to tax—can increase capacity and may complement investments in tax administration. Our approach bridges a long-standing divide between how scholars in public finance and political economy approach tax capacity building in developing countries.

This paper studies individual and social motives in tax evasion. We build a simple dynamic model that incorporates these motives and their interaction. The social motives underpin the role of norms and are the source of the dynamics that we study. Our empirical analysis exploits the adoption in 1990 of a poll tax to fund local government in the United Kingdom, which led to widespread evasion. The evidence is consistent with the model's main predictions on the dynamics of evasion.

Can taxes on consumption redistribute in developing countries? Contrary to consensus, we show that taxing consumption is progressive once we account for informal consumption. Using household expenditure surveys in 32 countries, we proxy for informal consumption using the type of store where purchases occur. We establish that the budget share spent in informal stores steeply declines with income, so that richer households pay a substantially larger share of their income in taxes. Our findings imply that the widespread policy of exempting food from taxation is hard to justify on equity grounds in low-income countries.