Italy is the first country to have experimented with both accruals and retrospective capital gains taxation along the lines suggested by Vickrey (1939) and Meade (1978). This paper describes the Italian experience, highlighting its peculiar features and the lessons that can be learned by other countries wishing to pursue these approaches. It illustrates the mechanics of the adjustments to the realization based capital gains tax and how far they diverge from the original proposals. The paper also draws attention to the administrative and political difficulties encountered in implementing the reform. These factors ultimately resulted in a repeal of retrospective taxation, and, in due course, may also entail the abolition of taxation on an accrual basis. The paper highlights the crucial role that financial intermediaries can play in lowering compliance costs under a proportional tax system and the effects on tax revenues.
This paper addresses the choice of banks between alternative channels for interbank payments. The conventional view assumes a tradeoff between the safety of real‐time gross settlement (RTGS) and the liquidity savings of multilateral netting. Moreover, correspondent banking is believed to be inefficient, both in terms of liquidity and of administrative costs. In the last decade, however, the impulse of the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems, technological changes and the management of RTGS systems by central banks have reduced the difference between the various systems. This is especially true for risk, whereas liquidity cost crucially depends on the refinancing policy adopted by the central bank and the co‐ordination among the participants. On the basis of the recent evolution of payment systems in Europe, we verify the importance of liquidity, as well as other variables like transaction costs, for the choice of banks among different settlement systems. Cost factors imply that the nature of payments flows (value, commercial versus financial) and some structural features of the banking systems (dimension of the intermediaries, concentration of the banking sector) become important. The analysis is carried out both through a theoretical model and a cross‐country comparison based on three data sources: ECB (European Central Bank, EBA (Euro Banking Association) and SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.