ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter aims to expand upon the book's conceptual approach and discuss several key issues in tax research from a novel angle, the better to broaden our understanding of tax regimes and inequality in Latin America. Starting from theoretical reflections on the political economy of natural resource rents and the tax state, the chapter discusses different findings of the book with a view to the concepts of structural heterogeneity and varying growth models. While the former concept pertains to the economic and social structural conditions of Latin American fiscality, the latter are understood as the allocative response to the problems that arise from structural heterogeneity, leading to different fiscal regimes in the region. Rather than conceiving of fiscal institutions as determinants of social and economic reality, this means understanding them as the expression of a particular socioeconomic reality in the resource-rich countries of the Global South and of fiscal policy dynamics arising from it. The analysis therefore centers around a specific social formation referred to here as “rent-based societies”. By tracing the fiscal contours of this social configuration, the chapter contributes to a more profound understanding of Latin American tax regimes and provides new perspectives on political economy and taxation.
