• fiscal sociology
• philosophy of economics
• tax on wealth
• tax on income
• fiscal law
• principles of taxation
• state building
• welfare state
• redistribution
• just taxation
• fair taxation
• fairness
• fiscal policy
• taxation

This thesis aims to study the concept of “fairness" in taxation from multiple points of view. The thesis is composed of three chapters: a simple meta-analysis to check if the economic literature is biased towards the research of optimality rather than fairness in taxation; a philosophical discussion of the development of the idea of fairness across time; an empirical study aspiring to answer to relevant questions regarding taxation in the Welfare State.
In the first section we confirm our hypothesis of inclination of the literature on analysing the optimality of taxation more then its fairness; however the degree of this bias is smaller than expected.
In the second section we show how several philosophical issues regarding taxation can be resolved studying them from the point of view of the aims of the State.
In the third section we prove that the state expenses have stopped growing in the last decades; that corporate taxes are getting harder to collect and that the burden of taxation is indeed increasing for the middle class but with considerable differences between France, Germany and Italy.