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2009 World Tax J. 3 (2009)

handle is hein.journals/wldtxjrn2009 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial Why a World Tax Journal now? Indeed, why a World Tax Journal (WTJ) now? There are already plenty of quite excellent tax reviews, so why do we need another one? The reason is very simple: the WTJ is different and unique, because it is an answer to the challenging ques- tion put by the scientific community to the legal and tax community: can the study of taxation be carried out as a scientific discipline? The answer may depend on how you define science, but it should be a resounding yes. The WTJ is a purely academic journal. We have received comprehensive and learned articles from outstanding colleagues worldwide, which did not fit into existing tax journals. These articles have been published in periodicals, like the Common Market Law Review or the Yale Law Journal, meeting the highest aca- demic standards, but which are not known as tax journals. The WTJ is ready to receive these comprehensive and learned articles on taxation, so that they will be known to the whole academic tax community. Since the turn of the last century, there has been increasing pressure from academic authorities and institutions for research funding to conform tax research to appraisal standards that are commonly used in exact sciences. Research is only valid when it is published in the international forum language of the discipline (English) and in peer reviewed journals, which as such are recognized on a world scale by the scientific communities. The academic legal community, including the tax community, has largely resisted this pressure with the argument that legal and tax research are different from research in exact science because (1) the study of law and, in particular, taxation concentrates on national phenomena and only very partially on worldwide events, and (2) legal and tax developments are not based on verifiable experiments, but, rather, on socially accepted legal and economic argumentation. Because tax is part of a normative social science, scholarship in tax cannot purely be based on the study of factual behaviour that can be researched using mathe- matical correlations between patterns of behaviour. The facts that are the object of research in taxation are also based on norms that are the expression of evolving economic and social objectives and of changes in moral values. These objectives and values are to a large extent determined by reference to a national framework that is very often not comparable with other national frameworks. As a conse- quence of this multi-layered development of legal rules and tax rules, it is possible to find many different explanations for tax developments of a historic, economic, WORLD TAX JOURNAL OCTOBER 2009 13 © IBFD

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