Tax reform is an issue of endless political debate in all developed and developing countries. The discussion on tax reform revolves around the issues relating to designing an appropriate tax base, strengthening tax administrations, and ensuring efficiency, equity, and progressive taxation. In Bangladesh, a lot of reform initiatives have taken in the last four decades. This study is an attempt to review those initiatives by highlighting corporate matters as there is hardly any research work on those issues in the context of Bangladesh. Content and document analysis and interview methods are used to carry out this study. The study finds that the outcome of those reforms is mixed and in some cases, noteworthy achievements are evident, as for examples, the establishment of Large Taxpayers Unit (LTU) and Central Intelligence Cell (CIC) and digitalization of the tax process, while remarkable weaknesses are still prevailing in enforcement, audit, and compliance. Revenue implication of tax reforms displays that the trend in the direct tax collection is increasing moderately, and the overall tax- GDP ratio is showing very slow progress. We recommend a new all-inclusive reform effort covering all the upcoming challenges in the field of corporate taxation as no comprehensive reform effort has been undertaken for nearly a decade.

Tax incentives are tools used worldwide to enhance domestic and foreign investment and enhanced investment leads to expected economic growth. This study is an attempt to review the industrial policies and direct tax incentives of Bangladesh to have a deep insight on the congruence among them and also show some indirect impact of tax incentives on development through analyzing some fiscal and investment data. Content and document analysis method has been used to accomplish this study. Sources of data were the industrial policies, tax codes and economic surveys of Bangladesh and some scholarly articles. By reviewing some tax related aspects of industrial polices and existing direct tax incentives provided by the tax authority, it was found that incentives suggested by industrial policies and actually provided tax incentives are almost same and the changing pattern of priority sectors have been shifted to infrastructure, power and technology sectors. By observing some investment and GDP related data it is found that local private sector investments are dominant over FDI and the manufacturing sectors contribution to GDP are increasing and consistent in last 13 years.