The relationship between tax policy and economic development in Ibn Khaldun and Arthur Laffer

Ibn Khaldun has remarkable views on economics, politics, morality, culture, epistemology, geography, philosophy, law and many other disciplines. The philosopher is one who discovered many principles of economics at a very early stage. Especially, his parallelism between tax rates and public revenues still has been inspiring to economists and financiers today. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun's contribution to the development of economic science is very important. The thinker has developed various ideas about the concept of value, division of labor, price system, supply and demand law, production and consumption, money and capital formation, population growth, public finance and so on. He has found parallels between the phenomenon of economic development and the process of societies' transition from nomadic community to state. What makes Ibn Khaldun special is not only his narrative of historical events, but his handling of the relationships between social, political, cultural and economic parameters in a deterministic and scientific way. In this respect, he led Max Weber, A. Smith, and Marx, Durkheim, Ricardo and many other scientists.