Fiscal incidence Fiscal incidence Fiscal incidence is a concept within public finance, a sub-discipline within economics, that refers to the combined overall economic impact of both government taxation and expenditures on the real economic income of individuals. While taxation reduces the economic well-being of individuals, government expenditures raise their economic well-being. Fiscal incidence is the term for the overall impact of government taxing and spending considered together. In theory, governments withdraw resources from society in the form of taxation, and contribute resources back into society in the form of expenditures. However, the burdens of taxation are not borne equally by individuals, and
Fiscal capacity cannot improve fiscal capacity by simply raising taxes if it does not have a political, legal and fiscal history that has supported such state-power. In comparison to Besley and Persson's individual level study, Gordon and Li (2009) focus on the role of businesses and the financial sector in developed versus developing countries. They model businesses' participation in the financial sector—where Gordon and Li specifically refer to participation in the financial sector as using banks—as participation in the formal sector; they assume that tax authorities can monitor bank records, so that mass participation in the financial sector lends the state information