The history of taxes reveals that their coercive nature is of comparatively recent development. The original idea of a tax was that payment was not obligatory upon the subject, but consisted rather as a voluntary contribution toward the expenses of government, as appears from the Medieval Latin term donum, and…

As a subfield of public economics, fiscal federalism is concerned with "understanding which functions and instruments are best centralized and which are best placed in the sphere of decentralized levels of government". In other words, it is the study of how competencies (expenditure side) and fiscal instruments (revenue side) are…

Taxation is the earliest and most prevalent form of government inter­ference with the economic life of individuals and business enter­prises. The right of the chief authority to collect taxes, and the general policy which determines who is to be taxed, how much the tax shall be, and for what purposes…