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Centre for Finance and Development
26 November 2019

Finance & Development Expertise: Taxing the rich – Compliance and fairness in community-based taxation – lessons from Paris in the middle ages

Professor Nathan Sussman, Director of the Centre for Finance and Development, and his colleague Professor Al Slivinski from the University of Western Ontario explain how the taille, a tax collection mechanism from medieval Paris, raised compliance by turning the social cost of tax evasion into a private one.

Nathan Sussman
Nathan SUSSMAN
Full Professor, International Economics & Pictet Chair in Finance and Development
Director, Centre for Finance and Development (CFD)
Co-Director, MAS in Sustainable Finance and Development
This taxation mechanism allowed the city government to collect the desired revenues at a low cost and with high levels of compliance, despite minimal bureaucratic machinery.
Nathan Sussman & Al Slivinski

The problem of tax compliance is as old as the levying of taxes. Innovations in tax administration that induce high compliance rates at reasonable cost are extremely important to governments. In a column for VoxEU, CFD Director Professor Nathan Sussman and Professor Al Slivinski from the University of Western Ontario demonstrate how the taille, a tax collection mechanism from medieval Paris, raised compliance by turning the social cost of tax evasion into a private one. They furthermore show that this tax collection model is still relevant to governments today.

Read the entire column here on VoxEU. The column has been first published on VoxEU on 20 March 2019.

 

In our series Finance & Development Expertise, we regularly present articles and other publications from the faculty of the Centre for Finance and Development (CFD). These include new publications as well as some of the best pieces from the archives.