Article: Intertemporal tax-smoothing and the government budget surplus: Canada and the United States.

AMIDST THE CHAOS that surrounds the budget-making process in most countries, it is often hard to believe that there is any rationale at all to the time pattern of budget deficits and taxes. Yet, under the plausible assumption that the distortionary effects of tax policies become more severe the higher the tax rate, economists can derive testable implications about the dynamic path of an optimal fiscal policy. In a seminal paper, Barro (1979) proposed a simple theory of tax smoothing: the government should spread the burden of raising taxes across time periods in order to minimize their burden.(1) This has important implications for the pattern of budget deficits: when faced ...

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