According to Italy’s Council of Ministers (December 2001), "Tax reforms can be made for several reasons: to produce more or less revenue, introduce new taxes or eliminate old ones; To (re) modulate progressivity; To make the tax system more efficient or more neutral; To simplify it, trying to reduce administration and compliance costs; To adapt it to the changes that in turn intervene in the structure of society and the economy, or to help determine them”.
We can therefore say that this course aims at studying the effects of taxation on the decisions of economic agents.
The last decades have seen an increase in market openness. In this context, national governments feel, on the one hand, the need to coordinate their own economic policies, thereby offsetting the revenue losses due to excessive tax competition. On the other hand, they undermine the loss of sovereignty that would result. This makes European coordination a long and troubled process.
The second part of the course, focusing mainly on the taxation of mobile factors (capital and income), aims to analyze the impact of tax instruments in an open economy.