Vivian Liu (Wiki User: Vivianliu94) is an undergraduate at Barnard College in New York City.

TOPIC: "FISCAL CAPACITY"

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I am building a new page, 'Fiscal Capacity'. Fiscal Capacity is a very large topic that can be broadly looked at through economic and political history or fiscal sociology AND/OR more recent public finance and public economics literature. Within these two overlapping categories, I'm struggling with figuring out how to best structure the page for fiscal capacity. Please see my sandbox for further details, and a bibliography.

Relevant Wikipedia Pages

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Listed in order of relevance (most to least):

  • Economic growth - C class and thus a contender for revision. Already references relevant major names in social science literature (i.e., Solow, Acemoglu, Barro, and a wealth of others) that are well-organized under subsection: Economic_growth#Theories_and_models. I'm not sure if I can speak to the quality of this subsection--some descriptions seem OK and some seem worse. Could use editing, editing isn't enough for a final project. Another aspect of this page is that there are issues with neutrality in subsection Economic_growth#Income_inequality (flagged, and a major topic in the talk-page). This section currently links to Economic inequality for further detail. I talk about the Economic inequality page later on in this list.
  • Tax - B class. Subsection Tax#Taxation_in_developing_countries is interesting and has almost no references, social science wise--specifically, it doesn't really reference any development economists and their work on fiscal capacity. This could be angle that I would work on. Subsection Tax#Theories_on_taxation is also fairly short, but it links to other pages. I would be particularly interested in developing optimal taxation theory in the page Optimal Tax. I will talk about this page later on this list.

Tax and Economic growth are the probably best pages, but are not well linked with each other. Those that should link them, but are insufficient are listed below. A major concern of mine is that I'll be repeating things if I edit these pages; i.e. the social science literature already listed under "Economic growth" under a new page like fiscal capacity, or as a revision for (for example) Public finance.

  • Public finance includes a bit on the role that tax revenue plays for a state i.e.: "necessary in a welfare State to fulfill its obligations. Taxation is used as an instrument of attaining certain social objectives i.e. as a means of redistribution of wealth and thereby reducing inequalities." Nonetheless, it seems that there is no existing article that details social science literature on public finance, state making or state capacity.
  • State Building - Not the same as state capacity, doesn't contain a section on fiscal capacity, noone is talking about it in the talk page either.
  • Optimal Tax - Start class. what exists is very encylopedic and very econ; not polisci. Not sure if there is 'political economy' literature on this topic/if it's relevant enough to the class.
  • public finance#Financing of government expenditure
  • public economics

I guess my problem is, in determining where and how I want to contribute, how to distinguish economic growth theory from public finance theory or state building theory?

Other pages of interest: