Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: taxation and state-building in developing countries
- 2 Between coercion and contract: competing narratives on taxation and governance
- 3 Capacity, consent and tax collection in post-communist states
- 4 Taxation and coercion in rural China
- 5 Mass taxation and state–society relations in East Africa
- 6 Contingent capacity: export taxation and state-building in Mauritius
- 7 Tax bargaining and nitrate exports: Chile 1880–1930
- 8 Associational taxation: a pathway into the informal sector?
- 9 Rethinking institutional capacity and tax regimes: the case of the Sino-Foreign Salt Inspectorate in Republican China
- 10 Tax reform and state-building in a globalised world
- References
- Index
9 - Rethinking institutional capacity and tax regimes: the case of the Sino-Foreign Salt Inspectorate in Republican China
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: taxation and state-building in developing countries
- 2 Between coercion and contract: competing narratives on taxation and governance
- 3 Capacity, consent and tax collection in post-communist states
- 4 Taxation and coercion in rural China
- 5 Mass taxation and state–society relations in East Africa
- 6 Contingent capacity: export taxation and state-building in Mauritius
- 7 Tax bargaining and nitrate exports: Chile 1880–1930
- 8 Associational taxation: a pathway into the informal sector?
- 9 Rethinking institutional capacity and tax regimes: the case of the Sino-Foreign Salt Inspectorate in Republican China
- 10 Tax reform and state-building in a globalised world
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Unenjoyable and equally unavoidable, taxation is at the very heart of politics: we find it at the macro-level concerns of political sociology and state-making, at the micro-level of individual compliance or resistance, and everywhere in between. The making of tax policy is an inherently political process, indeed so political that it could neatly invert the old aphorism: that politics is about who has to pay what, when, where and how. It is the fundamental argument of this chapter that the less ‘political’ and the more ‘bureaucratic’ the implementation of a tax regime is, the more legitimate it is likely to be for all concerned: political elites, taxpayers and tax administrators. The more legitimate state extraction is perceived to be, the more legitimate the state itself is likely to be.
Because the word ‘bureaucracy’ is at least as negatively charged in our vernaculars as the word ‘tax’, a few caveats are in order here. By ‘bureaucracy’ I do not mean Kafkaesque systems of unresponsive and unaccountable authority, red tape and catch–22 procedures, although certainly all bureaucratic systems can and upon occasion do produce such outcomes. I mean simply, following Weber, that bureaucracy is an organisational system of hierarchy in which
decisions taken at higher levels are incumbent and binding on lower levels;
decisions are implemented according to impersonal rules;
technocratic and knowledge-based decision-making tends to prevail over personal preference;
record-keeping provides institutional memory;
formal and fixed salaries make informal fee-taking unnecessary and deemed corrupt;
incumbents are clearly separable from the offices they hold.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Taxation and State-Building in Developing CountriesCapacity and Consent, pp. 212 - 234Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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