Design and Criteria to Strengthen Tax Autonomy of the Austrian Länder

There are several reasons to argue in favour of strengthening the tax autonomy granted to the Austrian Länder. Autonomy could be extended to a number of taxes and could assume different shapes which would have different distributional implications but might also have undesirable side-effects. The paper develops a number of criteria to assess the suitability of options for state-level taxes which are helpful for an initial outline evaluation but need to be augmented by in-depth analysis.