This Dissertation has been approached and framed to account for public administration performance perspective, and presents the results of my investigations into Tax administration (TA)-related issues from different dimensions, across multiple countries and many years. It covers three chapters corresponding to three empirical papers. The first chapter seeks to measure the performance of TA across 44 countries (32 OECD and 12 non-OECD countries), while considering the presence of contextual variables. Using the recently developed and advanced frontier estimators, such as the semi-nonparametric StoNED (Stochastic Nonparametric Envelopment of Data) approach by Johnson and Kuosmanen (2011, 2012) and the conditional order-m (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007) approach, the study was conducted with comparative data, extracted from the recent database on TA, the OECD TA database, versions 2013, 2015 and 2017 for two periods between 2008-2011 and 2012-2015. The second chapter observes the tax competitiveness in its tax complexity dimension, by covering 88 countries over timespan (2005-2016) and using the panel data nonparametric frontier method, i.e. the data envelopment analysis model without explicit output (hereafter, panel data DEA-WEO). A thorough view on tax simplification was conducted by measuring the efficiency both contemporaneous and long-run analysis (Surroca et al., 2016; Pérez-López et al., 2018), which allows producing a ranking (Toloo and Kresta, 2014), and examining the productivity change of these tax systems with Malmquist index (Karagiannis and Lovell, 2016). To be continued, the third chapter, taking an institutional approach, addresses the determinants of tax complexity stressing the impact of institutional environment quality, employing the panel system generalised method of moments (system-GMM) estimator (Arellano and Bover, 1995; Blundell and Bond, 1998). _x000D_ _x000D_ Taking a combination of alternative (including parametric and nonparametric) methods, innovative techniques and multiple specifications, this Dissertation generally contributes to public administration literature as the first quantitative empirical study and one among only a few projects that address TA at a cross-country level from multiple disciplines, i.e. public sector management, taxation, and efficiency analysis. It is the first attempt in the field to highlight (i) the performance evaluation of TA, acquired simultaneously from the views of both administrative cost and enforcement level for optimal TA, as found in Keen and Slemrod (2017), (ii) the application of tax performance measure with nonparametric frontier method in the context of implicit output, and (iii) the investigation of institutional determinations of tax complexity, emphasising the governance and economic freedom with a combination of parametric and nonparametric methods.
ESSAYS ON PUBLIC SECTOR MANAGEMENT: AN INTERNATIONAL STUDY ON TAX ADMINISTRATION
Nguyen, T. T. T. (Author). 17 Dec 2020
Student thesis: Doctoral thesis
Student thesis: Doctoral thesis