This paper examines the effects of taxation of human capital, physical capital and foreign assets in a multi-sector model of endogenous growth. It is shown that in general the growth rate is reduced by taxes on capital and labor (human capital) income. When the government faces no borrowing constraints and is able to commit to a given set of present and future taxes, it is shown that the optimal tax plan involves high taxation of both capital and labor in the short run. This allows the government to accumulate sufficient assets to finance spending without any recourse to distortionary taxation in the long run. When restrictions to government borrowing and lending are imposed, the model implies that human and physical capital should be taxed similarly.

This paper surveys the tax policy implications in various endogenous growth models. The focus is on the long-run growth effects of income, consumption, and investment taxation in models whose engine of growth is the accumulation of human capital, technological innovation, and/or public infrastructure. The results depend on model specifications. This paper also reviews quantitative results from cross-country regressions and simulations, and indicates some statistical and methodological problems to which they are subject. Tax policy implications in endogenous growth models both with tax policy endogenously determined by a political process and with international capital mobility are also discussed.

This paper studies effects of fiscal policy in an endogenous growth model with human capital and heterogenous agents. Two types of households are considered. One household acquires human capital or skills through education while the other household remains unskilled. Sustained growth is the result of human capital accumulation which is a function of the existing human capital employed in the educational sector and of public spending for education. Aggregate production is given by a function with physical capital and labor as input factors, where total labor input is modelled by a CES function with skilled and unskilled labor as arguments. The paper studies effects of fiscal policy as concerns long-run growth and the distribution of income as well as concerns welfare of the two households.

This collection examines the phenomenon of economic growth with admirable economic vigour and includes contributions from leading academic figures. Theoretical approaches, underpinned by original empirical work, will make this a book welcomed by students and academics of macroeconomics and growth theory.

Using state of the art mathematical techniques this book provides a complete characterization of the Uzawa-Lucas growth model. In his path-breaking contribution on the 'Mechanics of Economic Growth' Lucas suggested that human capital is the key variable through which technical change is most likely to occur and (by taking some initial intuitions of Uzawa a step further) proposed a two-sector capital accumulation growth model where human capital is allowed to enter a neo-classical-style production structure in multiplicative terms. In this book Paolo Mattana fully explores the dynamic possibilities of the model from both the market and the centralized perspective. A critical evaluation of the inefficiency in the market economy is also provided.

This paper discusses in a systematic and comprehensive way the existing literature on the relationship between the growth of countries’ economies and various public finance instruments, such as tax policy, expenditure policy, and overall budgetary policy, from the perspectives of allocative efficiency, macroeconomic stability, and income distribution. It reviews both the conceptual linkages between each of the instruments and growth and the empirical evidence on such relationships. It broadly concludes that fiscal policy could play a fundamental role in affecting the long-run growth performance of countries.