<p>It is widely agreed that, in the absence of specific corrective aims, the corporate tax system should aim for neutrality. A fully neutral tax would not affect the scale of a company's activities, nor the allocation of investment spending between different assets, nor the method by which this investment is financed. Moreover these properties should also hold under changing economic circumstances, particularly rising prices; in a world where inflation is endemic, for example, it is unrealistic to design a system which only functions well when inflation is zero.</p>
Authors
Michael Devereux
Research Associate University of Oxford and Oxford Centre for Business Taxation
Michael joined the IFS in 1982 and he has been a Research Fellow since 1990 and a Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford.
Harold Freeman
Journal article details
- ISSN
- Print: 0143-5671 Online: 1475-5890
- Issue
- August 1991
Suggested citation
Devereux, M and Freeman, H. (1991). 'A general neutral profits tax ' (1991)
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