Does military pressure boost fiscal capacity? Evidence from late-modern military revolutions in Europe and North America

Domingo, Oriol

doi:10.1093/ereh/hew006

European Review of Economic History

2016

DOI: 10.1093/ereh/hew006

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Does military pressure boost fiscal capacity? Evidence from late-modern military revolutions in Europe and North America

Oriol Domingo¹

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Cited by 5 publications

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“…(1961; Peacock 1997, p. 27)They observed peaking tax levels during wars which were separated by plateaus in times of peace, whereby each new plateau was always higher than the previous one. Indeed, this is a trend that can be observed throughout the early modern period (Bonney 1995, p. 9; Kiser and Linton 2001, p. 432; Sabaté 2016, p. 295). The displacement effect diminished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at least in the Western world, when tax levels had already reached substantial heights.…”

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Introduction: maximising revenues, minimising political costs – challenges in the history of public finance of the early modern period

Brandon¹,

Hart²,

Torres-Sánchez

2018

Financial History Review

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Taxation is accepted as a fact of modern life, despite recurring political conflict over the nature and direction of fiscal policies. Most financiers regard obligations issued by the state as a safe investment option. Neither taxation nor state obligations were taken for granted during much of the history of public finance, however, at least not before the early 1800s. The ‘tax state’ developed in fits and starts, driven by the exigencies of warfare, which provided the main rationale for raising state income. Although wartime fiscal innovations eventually facilitated the rise of an efficient military state, the options available for implementing such improvements and preferences for specific fiscal or financial instruments varied greatly across early modern states. Focusing on the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this introduction presents a framework for assessing these differences and introduces the other articles in this special issue.

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confidence: 82%

Introduction: maximising revenues, minimising political costs – challenges in the history of public finance of the early modern period

Brandon¹,

Hart²,

Torres-Sánchez

2018

Financial History Review

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The state does not live by warfare alone: War and revenue in the long nineteenth century

2022

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Previous research shows that wars contributed to the expansion of state revenues in the Early Modern period and in the twentieth century. There are, however, few cross-national studies on the long nineteenth century. Using new unbalanced panel data on wars and public revenues from 1816 to 1913 for 27 American and European countries, this article provides new evidence that military conflicts very rarely triggered lasting increases in public revenues during those years. We argue that the uneven diffusion of military innovations reduced the probability that international wars would be sufficiently intense to push state actors to seek additional resources. Moreover, the distinction between international and civil wars was blurred by the opportunities for non-state actors to mobilize military forces comparable to those of the state. Therefore, only very intense international and civil wars had a lasting impact on state revenues, but such conflicts were extremely rare, both in Europe and the Americas.

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Income tax progressivity and inflation during the world wars

Hetland¹,

Domingo

2021

European Review of Economic History

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This paper studies the impact of inflation on income taxes in Sweden, the UK, and the United States during the world wars. As tax reforms were rising top marginal rates and reducing exemption thresholds, extraordinary levels of inflation eroded the real value of exemptions, brackets, and deductions. The micro-simulation of actual and alternative scenarios shows that inflation made the tax less progressive, particularly in Sweden during World War I and the UK during World War II. Nevertheless, its redistributive effect increased due to the related growth in tax revenue. Inflation contributed to transform a “class tax’’ into a “mass tax”.

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Does military pressure boost fiscal capacity? Evidence from late-modern military revolutions in Europe and North America

Cited by 5 publications

References 39 publications

Introduction: maximising revenues, minimising political costs – challenges in the history of public finance of the early modern period

Introduction: maximising revenues, minimising political costs – challenges in the history of public finance of the early modern period

The state does not live by warfare alone: War and revenue in the long nineteenth century

Income tax progressivity and inflation during the world wars

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