Book Review
FROM OPTIMAL TAX THEORY TO TAX POLICY:
RETROSPECTIVE AND PROSPECTIVE VIEWS
by ROBIN BOADWAY
(MIT Press, 2012, Cambridge, MA, 290 pages)
Matthew Weinzierl
Robin Boadway is one of the most distinguished contributors to the modern theory
of optimal taxation, so his Munich Lectures, collected in this volume, provide a
welcome guide to this complex and important fi eld.
The book achieves two goals remarkably well. First, the goal expressed in its title is
to explain the lessons for real-world tax policy that are likely to be, and in some cases
already have been, drawn from tax theory. Skepticism over the relevance of optimal
tax theory has been around as long as the literature. But Boadway makes a compelling
case that theory has led to, or at least supported, several of the main trends in modern
tax policy. A second goal of the book is to review, selectively, the optimal tax literature.
Naturally, as a series of lectures, that review is largely nontechnical. But Boadway’s
expertise allows him to provide clear intuition for both the most important and some
of the lesser-known results of the fi eld, substituting for the clarity that formalism otherwise
provides.
The book’s third goal — prioritizing challenges to the theory going forward — is
more speculative, and therefore its success in achieving it is more diffi cult to appraise.
On one hand, Boadway is surely right to highlight three ways in which the simplifying
assumptions underlying current models are problematic: governments cannot fully
commit to policies, individuals differ in more than just income-earning abilities, and
people’s behavior is not purely rational. These challenges are well-known and will keep
theorists busy for some time. Boadway’s contribution here is to insightfully parse the
specifi c ways in which these simplifying assumptions are, and are not, serious problems
for the theory.
As part of this third goal, I would have liked Boadway to consider the question posed
by reversing his title, namely what lessons can we take “from tax policy to optimal tax