From World Politics Review, Bulgaria is intending on adopting a 10% flat tax rate. This is a huge win for libertarians like myself. From the article:
Since Estonia adopted a flat tax rate in 1994, enjoying very robust GDP growth ever since, Eastern European countries have been gradually warming to this system that promises to attract foreign direct investment, increase transparency, and drastically curb tax evasion. Slovakia, Romania, Albania and many former Soviet republics have all adopted a flat tax.
Now it’s Bulgaria’s turn: yesterday, the government declared it will introduce a flat tax rate on personal income. At 10 percent, Bulgaria’s flat tax rate will be among the lowest in the world, down from a tax rate that currently ranges between 20 and 24 percent.
Other countries with a flat tax regime are Macedonia, Ukraine, Mauritius, Mongolia and Russia.
Experience from countries that have adopted the flat tax has, in many cases, shown it to be a boon to economic growth. If only the Western nations, with their bloated welfare systems, massive military spending, large scale subsidization of inefficient industries and high taxation rates could learn from this.
This seems to be somewhat of a continuation and refinement of the neoliberal push in Latin America (among other places) of the 80s and 90s.
In that a large geographical area is disillusioned by the broken promises of another political and or economic system (populism and communism for LA and E.Europe respectively) and thus susceptible to the prescriptions and promises of the international financial instituions crowd.
As i intimated this seems to be a much improved version (which avoids for libertarians the intervention paradox involved in IMF lending programs for example, and actually I almost support it in principle, though i can still see value in a progressive yet overall reduced system of taxation.) It had better be an improved version, given how Latin America turned out. I think one thing to note is that the neoliberal programs in Latin America always looked better unde the miscroscope of GDP rather than other measures of; say equality or human development. It would be interesting to analyse how the ex eastern bloc countries perform on these indices.