Definition
A tax expenditure intended as social policy is here defined as the amount by which a jurisdiction voluntarily foregoes revenue otherwise owed by a set of taxpaying units via provisions in the tax code, which define the set by specifying criteria to be met by those units; the tax expenditure is explicitly rationalized by appeal to a social end rather than a basic principle of taxation or other government objective. There are variations in the specific definitions of the “tax expenditure” concept across analysts and countries, as well as in what is considered as a “social” end.
Introduction
The general concept of tax expenditure has received extensive attention from analysts, scholars of public finance and economics, policymakers, and advocates of tax reform since being brought to the fore as a reform issue by Surrey (1970, 1973). Normative principles focused on efficiency in taxation emphasize...
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Streams, M., Gavilo-Lane, L. (2016). Tax Expenditures as Social Policy. In: Farazmand, A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_2649-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_2649-1
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