Table of Contents

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

About the Author

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.

Reviews

An extraordinary review of the tax system ... the most comprehensive and devastating indictment of the current situation.
*Will Hutton, The Observer*