South African Tax Reform Course

Lesson 1 • Excise Taxes and Corrective Levies

Covers Pigouvian excise design, rate-setting, and revenue earmarking debates. Links corrective taxation to both fiscal and behavioural reform objectives.

Lesson 2 • Value-Added Tax Architecture

Explains invoice-credit VAT mechanics, registration thresholds, and exemptions. Provides the structural knowledge needed to evaluate VAT adoption proposals.

Lesson 3 • Retail Sales Tax Design

Covers single-stage RST structure, vendor collection, and compliance challenges. Contrasts RST with VAT to clarify reform choice implications.

Lesson 4 • Cash-Flow and Expenditure Taxes

Introduces consumed-income and business cash-flow tax as reform blueprints. Shows how these designs achieve consumption taxation through income-side mechanics.

Lesson 1 • Principles of Taxation

Covers equity, efficiency, simplicity, and revenue adequacy as design criteria. Connects foundational theory to every reform decision made throughout the course.

Lesson 2 • Types of Taxes and Bases

Distinguishes income, consumption, wealth, and payroll tax bases. Provides the taxonomy learners need to analyse reform proposals accurately.

Lesson 3 • Revenue Estimation Fundamentals

Introduces static and dynamic scoring methods to project reform costs, outlining assumptions, baseline construction, and feedback loops. Helps learners read official revenue estimates and gauge uncertainty.

Lesson 4 • Historical Evolution of Tax Policy

Traces how tax structures have shifted in response to economic and political pressures. Provides context for understanding why reform cycles recur.

Lesson 1 • Stakeholder Analysis and Lobbying

Maps interest group positions, lobbying strategies, and reform coalition dynamics. Connects political economy theory to observed reform outcomes.

Lesson 2 • Tax Administration and Compliance

Covers tax administration capacity, withholding systems, and information reporting requirements. Links administrative feasibility to reform design choices throughout the course.

Lesson 3 • Legislative Process and Budget Rules

Covers budget reconciliation, pay-as-you-go rules, and sunset provisions. Shows how procedural rules shape the scope and durability of reform legislation.

Lesson 4 • Evaluating Reform Outcomes

Applies distributional tables, growth models, and compliance metrics to assess reform. Synthesises course tools into a comprehensive reform evaluation framework.

Lesson 1 • Housing and Mortgage Tax Preferences

Analyses mortgage interest deduction, exclusion of imputed rent, and capital gains exclusion. Connects housing preferences to affordability and distributional reform debates.

Lesson 2 • Defining and Measuring Tax Expenditures

Establishes the benchmark tax concept and catalogues major expenditure categories. Provides the analytical framework for identifying hidden spending in the tax code.

Lesson 3 • Health and Education Tax Preferences

Reviews employer health exclusion, HSA rules, and education credits and deductions. Assesses reform options that balance access goals with fiscal cost.

Lesson 4 • Retirement and Savings Incentives

Covers defined-contribution, defined-benefit, and IRA tax deferral mechanics. Evaluates whether savings incentives create new saving or shift existing assets.

Lesson 1 • Filing Units and Family Taxation

Addresses marriage penalties, filing status choices, and dependent treatment. Reveals how family structure interacts with tax design in reform proposals.

Lesson 2 • Alternative Minimum Tax Mechanics

Explains AMT structure, preference items, and reform rationale for repeal or redesign. Illustrates unintended consequences of parallel tax systems.

Lesson 3 • Capital Gains and Investment Income

Covers preferential rates on capital gains and their behavioural and distributional effects. Links investment income treatment to broader reform equity debates.

Lesson 4 • Rate Structures and Brackets

Examines marginal rate schedules, bracket design, and rate compression effects. Directly informs reform debates about top-rate changes and middle-class relief.

Lesson 1 • Capital Gains at Death

Analyses carryover basis, deemed realisation, and mark-to-market reform options. Connects stepped-up basis repeal to estate tax reform and revenue scoring.

Lesson 2 • Distributional Effects of Wealth Taxes

Measures wealth concentration, tax burden distribution, and behavioural responses. Grounds reform advocacy in empirical evidence on wealth tax outcomes.

Lesson 3 • Gift Tax and Lifetime Transfers

Explains annual exclusions, lifetime exemptions, and gift-estate tax unification. Shows how transfer tax integration prevents avoidance through lifetime giving.

Lesson 4 • Net Wealth Tax Mechanics

Covers annual wealth tax base definition, valuation challenges, and liquidity issues. Assesses administrative feasibility as the central reform constraint.

Lesson 1 • Transfer Pricing and Profit Shifting

Explains arm's-length standard, BEPS risks, and formulary apportionment alternatives. Connects transfer pricing rules to base erosion and reform urgency.

Lesson 2 • Global Minimum Tax Frameworks

Analyses Pillar Two income inclusion rules, undertaxed profits rules, and rate floors. Evaluates minimum tax as a multilateral reform coordination mechanism.

Lesson 3 • Anti-Avoidance and CFC Rules

Covers controlled foreign corporation rules, GILTI-type regimes, and hybrid mismatches. Shows how anti-avoidance rules patch gaps in territorial systems.

Lesson 4 • Residence vs. Source Taxation

Contrasts worldwide and territorial tax systems and their reform implications. Establishes the foundational choice driving most international reform debates.

Lesson 1 • Corporate Rate and Base Design

Analyses statutory rate choices, effective rates, and base-broadening options. Connects rate-base trade-offs to investment incentives and revenue outcomes.

Lesson 2 • Corporate Integration Concepts

Addresses double taxation of dividends and integration reform options. Frames the classical vs. integrated system debate central to corporate reform.

Lesson 3 • Depreciation and Expensing Policy

Compares economic depreciation, bonus depreciation, and full expensing regimes. Shows how capital cost recovery rules drive investment timing and magnitude.

Lesson 4 • Pass-Through Entity Taxation

Covers S-corps, partnerships, and sole proprietorships and their reform treatment. Highlights equity concerns when pass-through rates diverge from corporate rates.