Reforming the Tax System for the 21st Century
The Mirrlees Review

Research

Core editorial team

The commission was chaired by:

• Sir James Mirrlees: Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge, and joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1996

The Commission's work was directed by:

• Tim Besley: Professor of Economics and Political Science at the London School of Economics, IFS Research Fellow, and member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England
• Richard Blundell CBE: Research Director of the IFS, David Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at University College London, and President of the Econometric Society
• Malcolm Gammie QC, CBE: Barrister at One Essex Court, Research Director of the IFS Tax Law Review Committee, and past President of the Chartered Institute of Taxation
• James Poterba: Head of the Economics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and recent member of President Bush's bi-partisan Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform

The Commission's editorial team:

• Stuart Adam: senior research economist at IFS
• Stephen Bond: Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford, Programme Director at the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, and Research Fellow at IFS
• Robert Chote: Director of IFS
• Paul Johnson: Research Fellow at IFS and an Associate of Frontier Economics, formerly head of the Government Economic Service
• Gareth Myles: Professor of Economics at the University of Exeter and Research Fellow of IFS

This team is co-ordinating the individual projects and will be responsible for writing two review chapters for the final report: a discussion of the principles of a good tax system for an advanced open economy in the 21st century, and specific proposals for reform of the UK tax system.

Thematic projects

Nine projects will address key themes of the Review, each co-authored by IFS researchers and leading experts from around the world, with invited commentaries from other distinguished experts to ensure diversity of intellectual and institutional perspective. Participants come from the UK, continental Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and are a mixture of economists, lawyers, political scientists, tax practitioners and others. The intention is neither to constrain project teams to views laid down by the editors, nor to bind the editors to accept the conclusions of each project. Each resulting chapter and set of commentaries will therefore be valuable in its own right as an assessment and extension of existing knowledge, with UK application.

The Review has also commissioned three papers reviewing specific topics: labour supply and taxes; the effects on consumption and saving of taxing asset returns; and small business taxation.

This chapter will assess the current state of the UK tax system, placing it in historical, international and theoretical context.

The discussion of this chapter will cover the present state of optimal income tax theory and its applicability to the real world.

This chapter provides an overview of the literature relating labour supply to taxes and welfare benefits with a focus on presenting the empirical consensus.

This chapter will cover indirect taxation and the discussion of VAT versus expenditure tax versus GST.

The chapter will include discussion of the general principles involved in the use of taxes to address environmental externalities, and also of specific issues arising in particular areas of potential application.

The discussion of the tax base will cover both traditional income tax vs expenditure tax issues and an analysis of dynamic optimality, risk and returns, and different approaches to wealth taxation.

This chapter will look at the taxation of land and property, wealth more generally, gifts, trusts and inheritance.

The aim of this study is to review what we know about how responsive consumption and saving choices are to tax incentives and in particular to interest rate changes.

The focus will be on developments since the Meade Report that impact on the effects of taxes on companies and the relationship between corporate and personal income taxes.

This chapter will discuss the role of international considerations in tax design.

This chapter considers how small, owner-managed businesses are currently taxed and how this might be improved.

This chapter will address, from a theoretical and empirical perspective, the practical issues that arise in the operation of a modern tax system, with particular attention to the UK tax system.

This chapter will look at the major changes in tax policy in the UK and around the world in the past 25 years and the forces that have shaped these, identifying the international trends and common elements and asking why they have emerged and what lessons can be learned for tax policy generally and for the UK in particular.