This volume of essays explores the history of the U.S. tax mission to Japan during the occupation following World War II. Under General MacArthur, economist Carl S. Shoup led the mission with the charge of framing a tax system for Japan designed to strengthen democracy and accelerate economic recovery. The volume examines the sources, conduct, and effects of the mission and situates the mission within the history of international financial and fiscal reform. The book begins by establishing the context of progressive social investigations of taxation, including Shoup's earlier tax missions to France and Cuba. It then goes on to explore the Japanese background to the Shoup mission and the process by which American and Japanese tax experts shaped their recommendations. The book then assesses and explains the mission's accomplishments in the context of the political economies of the United States and Japan. It concludes by analyzing the global implications of the mission, which became iconic among international tax reformers.
Brownlee, W. Elliot: - W. Elliot Brownlee is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent books include Federal Taxation in America: A Short History (Cambridge, 2004), The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and its Legacies (co-edited with Hugh Davis Graham), America's History (three editions, co-authored with James Henretta, David Brody, Susan Ware and Marilynn S. Johnson), and Funding the Modern American State: The Rise and Fall of the Era of Easy Finance, 1941-1995 (Cambridge, 2003). His scholarly articles have appeared in American Nineteenth Century History, the Asia-Pacific Journal, The Center Magazine, Explorations in Economic History, The Journal of Economic History, Keio Economic Studies, The National Tax Journal, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, The Quarterly Review of Economics and Business, Reviews in American History, Rikkyo Economic Review, Sekai ('The World'), Social Philosophy and Policy, Tax Notes, The Wilson Quarterly and The Wisconsin Magazine of History.
Fukagai, Yasunori: - Yasunori Fukagai is Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Yokohama National University, Japan. His field of scholarly emphasis is the history of economic thought, and his research has focused on British utilitarian thinkers. He has published numerous scholarly articles and two edited books, Inspecting the Market Society: From Smith to Keynes (in Japanese) and British Empire, Social Integration and the History of Economic Thought (forthcoming, with Martin Daunton and Junichi Himeno). He has organized many conferences and lectured widely in Great Britain, the United States, Canada and Portugal, as well as Japan. He has received numerous major research grants, including a current one from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science to support 'The Organic View of the Society and the Designing of Economic Governance: Comparative Research on Economic Thought from the Fin-de-Siècle to the Inter-war Period'. He is the director of developmental plan for the Carl S. Shoup Collection in the possession of the University Library of Yokohama National University.
Ide, Eisaku: - Eisaku Ide is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Keio University, Japan. He has served on many governmental commissions and committees for agencies of the Japanese government, including the Ministry of Finance, the office of the Cabinet, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. His major field of scholarly emphasis is fiscal history and he has published several books and numerous articles on the history of Japanese budgetary and monetary policy during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. He recently published two articles in English: 'The End of the Strong State?: On the Evolution of Japanese Tax Policy', with Sven Steinmo (in The New Fiscal Sociology: Comparative and Historical Perspective, Cambridge, 2009) and 'The Origins of Macro-Budgeting and the Foundations of Japanese Public Finance: Drastic Fiscal Reform in Occupation Era', (in Keio Economic Studies 47, 2011). He has received the Susumu Sato Award from the Japanese Association of Local Public Finance and the Sozei Siryokan Award from The Institute of Tax Research and Literature.
