The Flat Tax: Fiscal Revolution or Policy Diffusion?

Abstract

Since 1994, nine European countries have adopted some type of ‘flat tax’, a programmatically vague but politically popular approach to fiscal reform. Journalists have chronicled the phenomenon with almost breathless enthusiasm. ‘A quiet revolution has been sweeping through countries of the old Soviet bloc’, reported the London Sunday Times in August 2005. ‘The flat tax revolution is sweeping across Europe’, declared an Australian newspaper just a week later. ‘Flat taxes, once a fantasy of free market ideologues, are sweeping across the European Union’, commented another.¹