La fiscalité indirecte est au cœur des préoccupations de l’Union européenne et des Etats membres. Pour l’Union européenne, la fiscalité indirecte représente un élément structurant du marché intérieur. Pour les Etats membres, la fiscalité indirecte est un symbole de la souveraineté nationale et une ressource importante. L’opposition des volontés de l’Union européenne et des Etats membres conduit alors à s’interroger sur la place de la fiscalité indirecte dans la construction européenne. La confrontation des volontés de l’Union européenne et des Etats membres a mené à donner une place particulière à la fiscalité indirecte. Cette spécificité est engendrée par l’interaction entre deux mouvements d’intégration. L’intégration négative va soumettre tout le régime des impôts indirects au contrôle des institutions européennes. Les Etats sont alors « dépossédés » de leur souveraineté fiscale. L’intégration positive, qui nécessite le consentement unanime de tous les Etats membres, va leur permettre de retrouver leur souveraineté. / Indirect taxation is at the heart of the concerns of the European Union and the Member States. For the European Union, indirect taxation is a structuring element of the internal market. For the Member States, indirect taxation is a symbol of national sovereignty and an important resource. The opposition of the wishes of the European Union and the Member States leads us to wonder about the place of indirect taxation in the construction of Europe. The confrontation of the wishes of the Union and the Member States has led to give a special place to indirect taxation. This specificity is generated by the interaction between two integration movements. Negative integration will subject the whole system of indirect taxes to the control of the European institutions. States are then "dispossessed" of their fiscal sovereignty. Positive integration, which requires the unanimous consent of all member states, will enable them to regain their sovereignty.

Policy makers in the Southeast Asian region are faced with many challenges in national policy taxation from globalization, in particular the increasing cross-border mobility of capital. One of the challenges is the competition to attract a mobile capital base which leads to a trend towards declining statutory corporate taxation rates and a pressure to harmonize taxation policy. This study explores taxation literature and uses empirical evidence from the period of 1996-2006 to examine tax competition and tax harmonization in the region. The study seeks evidence for the existence of tax competition by analyzing recent trends in two groups of measures of taxation: tax rates and tax revenues. This begins with looking at the trends of statutory corporate tax rate. Evidence is found for a decline in statutory corporate tax rates, developments commensurate with the existence of tax competition. On the contrary, the tax revenue data presented here, show that the expected decline in total tax revenues has not occurred; indeed, a significant increase has been recorded. It is also supported by empirical evidence of the ratio of corporate tax revenue either relative to GDP or to total tax revenue. The strengthening of these revenues has meant that the expected shift in the tax burden away from mobile to immobile factors has also failed to materialize. The two groups of measures of taxation thus provide apparently inconsistent views of the impact of tax competition. There follows an analysis of the elements of tax competition according to literature, in an attempt to draw out its implications for the experience within the Southeast Asian region. This study also examines the case for tax harmonisation and the Southeast Asian experience and it is concluded that the progress of tax harmonisation between countries has tended to be difficult to achieve because of the differences among the countries in terms of the tax structures and level of economies.

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This thesis is empirically grounded in New Zealand's restructuring of unemployment and taxation policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Theoretically it is inspired by a post-Marxist discourse analytical approach that focuses on discourses as political strategies. This approach has made it possible, through an analysis of changing citizenship discourses, to understand how the neoliberalisation of New Zealand's citizenship regime proceeded via debate and struggle over unemployment and taxation policy. Debates over unemployment and taxation in New Zealand during the 1980s and 1990s reconfigured the targets of policy and re-ordered social antagonism, establishing a neoliberal citizenship regime and centring political problematic. This construction of a neoliberal citizenship regime involved re-specifying the targets of public policy as consumers and taxpayers. In exploring the hegemonic discourse strategies of the Fourth Labour Government and the subsequent National-led governments of the 1990s, this thesis traces the process of reconfiguring citizen subjectivity initially as 'social consumers' and participants in a coalition of minorities, and subsequently as universal taxpayers in antagonistic relation to unemployed beneficiaries. These changes are related back to key discursive events in New Zealand's recent social policy history as well as to shifts in the discourses of politicians that address the nature of the public interest and the targets of social policy. I argue that this neoliberalisation of New Zealand's citizenship regime was the outcome of the hegemonic articulatory discourse strategies of governing parties in the 1980s and 1990s. Struggles between government administrations and citizen-based social movement groups were articulated to the neoliberal project. I also argue that in the late 1990s, discursive struggle between the dominant parties to define themselves in difference from each other reveals both the 'de'contestation of a set of neoliberal policy prescriptions, underscoring the neoliberal political problematic, and the privileging of a contributing taxpayer identity as the source of political legitimacy. This study shows that the dynamics of discursive struggle matter and demonstrates how the outcomes of discursive struggle direct policy change. In particular, it establishes how neoliberal discourse strategies evolved from political discourses in competition with other discourses to become the hegemonic political problematic underscoring institutional practice and policy development.