《财政理论：理论与现实的冲突》.pdfVIP

FISCAL POLICY: WHEN THEORY COLLIDES WITH REALITY* By Vito Tanzi * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Congress of the International Institute of Public Finance. (Bocconi University, Milan, August 25, 2004), and at seminars at the European Central Bank, (Frankfurt), the Inter-American Development Bank (Washington, D.C.) and the International Monetary Fund (Washington, D.C.). Comments received from Agnar Sandmo, Barry Eichengreen, and participants at the seminars were much appreciated. **The author is a former Director of the Fiscal Affairs Department of the IMF and a former Economy Undersecretary in the Italian Government. He is, at present, a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank. The views expressed in this paper are strictly personal. 2 Introduction The term fiscal comes from the Latin word fisc alis which in turn comes from fiscus, i.e. a basket used for collecting money. In Italian “il fisco”refers to the agency that collects taxes. Thus “fiscal policy” means policy related to taxes. The same is the case in Spanish, French, and Portuguese. In English the expression “fiscal policy” was apparently first used by Edwin R.A. Seligman, a prominent professor of public finance at Columbia University in the early part of the 20th century. He used the expression to criticize Adolf Wagner, a German economist, who had suggested that governments should engage in some redistribution of income through their budgetary activities. This seems to be the genesis of the “redistribution branch” of the trilogy made popular by Richard Musgrave (1959). The Keynesian