How did today's rich states first establish modern fiscal systems? To answer this question, Political Transformations and Public Finances by Mark Dincecco examines the evolution of political regimes and public finances in Europe over the long term. The book argues that the emergence of efficient fiscal institutions was the result of two fundamental political transformations that resolved long-standing problems of fiscal fragmentation and absolutism. States gained tax force through fiscal centralization and restricted ruler power through parliamentary limits, which enabled them to gather large tax revenues and channel funds toward public services with positive economic benefits. Using a novel combination of descriptive, case study and statistical methods, the book pursues this argument through a systematic investigation of a new panel database that spans eleven countries and four centuries. The book's findings are significant for our understanding of economic history and have important consequences for current policy debates.

In 1914, taxation was about 10 per cent of GNP; by 1979, taxes had risen to almost half of the total national income, and contributed to the rise of Thatcher. Martin Daunton continues the story begun in Trusting Leviathan, offering an analysis of the politics of acceptance of huge tax rises after the First World War and asks why it did not provoke the same levels of discontent in Britain as it did on the continent. He further questions why acceptance gave way to hostility at the end of this period. Daunton views taxes as the central driving force for equity or efficiency. As such he provides a detailed discussion of their potential in providing revenue for the state, and their use in shaping the social structure and influencing economic growth. Just Taxes places taxation in its proper place, at the centre of modern British history.

This volume identifies and compares 'fiscal squeezes' (major efforts to cut public spending and/or raise taxes) in the UK over a century from 1900 to 2015. The authors examine how different the politics of fiscal squeeze and austerity is today from what it was a century ago, how (if at all) fiscal squeezes reshaped the state and the provision of public services, and how political credit and blame played out after austerity episodes. The analysis is both quantitative and qualitative, starting with reported financial outcomes from historical statistics and then going behind those numbers to explore the political choices and processes in play. This analysis identifies some patterns that have not been explained or even recognized in earlier works on retrenchment and austerity. For example, it identifies a long term shift from what it terms a 'surgery without anaesthetics' approach (deep but short-lived episodes of spending restraint or tax increases) in the earlier part of the period towards a 'boiling frogs' approach (episodes in which the pain is spread out over a longer period) in more recent decades. It also identifies a curious reduction of revenue-led squeezes in more recent decades, and a puzzle over why blame-avoidance logic only led to outsourcing painful decisions over squeeze in a minority of cases. Furthmore, the volume's distinctive distinctive approach to classifying types of fiscal squeezes and qualitatively assessing their intensity seeks to solve the puzzle as to why voter 'punishment' of governments that impose austerity policies seems to be so erratic.

Fiscal Crisis of the State refers to the tendency of government expenditures to outpace revenues in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but its relevance to other countries of the period and also in today's global economy is evident. When government expenditure constitutes a larger and larger share of total economy theorists who ignore the impact of the state budget do so at their own (and capitalism's) peril. This volume examines how changes in tax rates and tax structure used to regulate private economic activity. O'Connor theorizes that particular expenditures and programs and the budget as a whole can be understood only in terms of power relationships within the private economy. O'Connor's analysis includes an anatomy of American state capitalism, political power and budgetary control in the United States, social capital expenditures, social expenses of production, financing the budget, and the scope and limits of reform. He shows that the simultaneous growth of monopoly power and the state itself generate an increasingly severe social crisis. State monopolies indirectly determine the state budget by generating needs that the state must satisfy. The state administration organizes production as a result of a series of political decisions. Over time, there is a tendency for what O'Connor calls the social expenses of production to rise, and the state is increasingly compelled to socialize these expenses. The state has three ways to finance increased budgetary outlays: create state enterprises that produce social expenditures; issue debt and borrowing against further tax revenues; raise tax rates and introduce new taxes. None of these mechanisms are satisfactory. Neither the development of state enterprise nor the growth of state debt liberates the state from fiscal concerns. Similarly, tax finance is a form of economic exploitation and thus a problem for class analysis. O'Connor contends that the fiscal crisis of the capitalist state is the inevitable consequence of the structural gap between state expenditures and revenues. The state's only way to ameliorate the fiscal crisis is to accelerate the growth of the social-industrial complex. In his new introduction, O'Connor describes The Fiscal Crisis of the State as "the product of a unique combination of personal, intellectual, and political experiencesà." He goes on to explain the origins of his theory and the consequences of The Fiscal Crisis of the State. He answers the question "is there a fiscal crisis today?" and discusses changes in fiscal policy since the '60s and '70s.

黛博拉·布罗蒂加姆、奥德-黑尔格·菲耶尔斯塔德、米克·摩尔主编的这本《发展中国家的税收与国家构建》明确了税收作为核心来构建国家和和社会的重要性，围绕这个中心议题，作者进行了专业和深入的研究，取得了显著的成果。并提供了一系列优秀的案例研究，展示政府如何能在收入提高的同时也促进了政体的公共福利发展。国家的税收对于人民的生活带来了巨大的差异，民众更高的生活水平背后实际上是与其相一致的税收。本书的内容跨越了洲际与政治体制的限制，为我们清晰、冷静地分析了当代政治经济学发展中最重要的议题；税收是现代社会的基石，但对于贫穷的国家，税收还承载着脱离混乱保持发展的责任。这本书通过巧妙的剖析认为，全球模式的发展方向已经有损于贫穷国家的利益，应该如何应对，作者进行了细心的求证。

"States of Credit" provides the first comprehensive look at the joint development of representative assemblies and public borrowing in Europe during the medieval and early modern eras. In this pioneering book, David Stasavage argues that unique advances in political representation allowed certain European states to gain early and advantageous access to credit, but the emergence of an active form of political representation itself depended on two underlying factors: compact geography and a strong mercantile presence. Stasavage shows that active representative assemblies were more likely to be sustained in geographically small polities. These assemblies, dominated by mercantile groups that lent to governments, were in turn more likely to preserve access to credit. Given these conditions, smaller European city-states, such as Genoa and Cologne, had an advantage over larger territorial states, including France and Castile, because mercantile elites structured political institutions in order to effectively monitor public credit. While creditor oversight of public funds became an asset for city-states in need of finance, Stasavage suggests that the long-run implications were more ambiguous. City-states with the best access to credit often had the most closed and oligarchic systems of representation, hindering their ability to accept new economic innovations. This eventually transformed certain city-states from economic dynamos into rentier republics. Exploring the links between representation and debt in medieval and early modern Europe, "States of Credit" contributes to broad debates about state formation and Europe's economic rise.

The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective demonstrates that the study of taxation can illuminate fundamental dynamics of modern societies. The sixteen essays in this collection offer a state-of-the-art survey of the new fiscal sociology that is emerging at the intersection of sociology, history, political science, and law. The contributors include some of the foremost comparative historical scholars in these disciplines and others. They approach the institution of taxation as a window onto the changing social contract. Their chapters address the social and historical sources of tax policy, the problem of how taxes persist, and the social and cultural consequences of taxation. They trace fundamental connections between tax institutions and macrohistorical phenomena - wars, shifting racial boundaries, religious traditions, gender regimes, labor systems, and more.