IEB Report

Tax Systems Analysis

Reforma fiscal: presente y futuro

IEB Report 3/2022: Tax Reform: Present and Future

In 2013, we published an IEB Report on tax reform with the subtitle “We Have Outgrown the Garage and it Needs Clearing Out” – an analogy used by Lawrence Summers in reference to the evolution of tax systems. Nearly 10 years later, the garage has once again filled with clutter. Since the last spring cleaning, two reports on reforms to the Spanish tax system have been published: the so-called Lagares Report (2014) and now the White Paper on Tax Reform (2022), the latter being nearly twice as long as the former. The greater length of the 2022 white paper comes down to the fact that, in addition to providing a quantitative diagnosis of Spain’s public finances, it also addresses a number of other issues, including the serious environmental problems we are currently facing, the energy crisis, the digitalisation of the economy, and rising income and wealth inequality.