摘要：World over, tax systems have undergone significant changes during the last 20 years as many countries across different ideological spectrum and varying levels of development have undertaken reforms. The wave of tax reforms across the world that began in the mid 1980s actually accelerated in the 1990s motivated by a number of factors. In many developing countries, pressing fiscal imbalance was the driving force. Tax policy was employed as a principal instrument to correct severe budgetary pressures (Ahmad and Stern, 1991). In others, the transition from plan to market necessitated wide ranging tax reforms. Besides efficiency considerations, these tax reforms had to address the issue of replacing public enterprise profits with taxes as a principal source of revenue and aligning tax policy to change the development strategy.
