Tax By Design

Sir James Mirrlees is a Fellow of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge, Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, and Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and past President of the Econometric Society, the Royal Economic Society, and the European Economic Association, and has been awarded numerous honorary degrees. Working primarily on the economics of incentives and asymmetric information, he founded the modern theory of optimal taxation, and was the joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1996. He was knighted in 1997 for contributions to economic science. In 2009, he was appointed Founding Master of the Morningside College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

An extraordinary review of the tax system ... the most comprehensive and devastating indictment of the current situation.

• 1: Introduction 2: The Economic Approach to Tax Design 3: The Taxation of Labour Earnings 4: Reforming the Taxation of Earnings in the UK 5: Integrating Personal Taxes and Benefits 6: Taxing Goods and Services 7: Implementation of VAT 8: VAT and Financial Services 9: Broadening the VAT Base 10: Environmental Taxation 11: Tax and Climate Change 12: Taxes on Motoring 13: The Taxation of Household Savings 14: Reforming the Taxation of Savings 15: Taxes on Wealth Transfers 16: The Taxation of the Land and Property 17: Taxing Corporate Income 18: Corporate Taxation in an International Context 19: Small Business Taxation 20: Conclusions and Recommendations for Reform Reference Index