Recent several worldwide social and political phenomena have revealed how significantly taxation—the state's capacity to raise financial resources to accomplish its policy goals—and public finance influence social, economic, and political system of a nation state. The age of austerity after the Great Recession from 2008 induced the global hardship of middle-class and the rise of populism and nationalism in the 2010s. In 2020, governments across the world have urgently carried out temporary economic and social programs, including temporary rate reductions or deferred payment options of the value-added tax (VAT), in order to cope with the turmoil given by the spread of the COVID–19. This choice has been expanding expenditures, budget deficits, and debt accumulation of governments all around the world. Without considering how to obtain taxpayer consent and to raise revenues, most countries may face with further difficulties to provide their citizens with fiscal policies that fund public services and social programs they usually demand. Then, fiscal states all around the world may further lose citizens' confidence in states, taxpayer consent, and extractive capacity, resulting in falling into another fiscal crises. Within less than half a century, the VAT has become one of most dominant revenue instruments of states across the world. In 1918, German businessman Wilhelm von Siemens proposed the VAT as a "refinement" or improvement to the German cascading turnover tax. In 1920 and 1921, the American economist Thomas S. Adams proposed an invoice-credit method VAT as an alternative to business income taxation. After the French Parliament legislated the VAT on April 10, 1954, the popularity of the VAT has rapidly ascended. In 1967, the European Economic Community decided to adopt the VAT as the common form of sales taxes among its member countries. As well as European Union member states, this wave has also reached main Asian countries (including China and Japan), Russia, Latin America, and the African continent. Now, the VAT is in force in more than 160 countries around the world. In terms of revenue collection, it represents the predominant part of a nation's fiscal revenue among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that have adopted VATs. As the most prominent exception among OECD countries, only the United States has not yet adopted it. The worldwide success and a few cases of failure of the VAT are tightly related to its technical aspect and the historical context of each country. In the case of France, the success of the VAT has been explained in terms of (1) the large tax base of the VAT, (2) the difficulty to commit fraud, (3) its promotive aspect of international trade and liberalization after World War II, and (4) the so-called "money machine" character that has financed the growth of the French welfare state. Some scholars have viewed that the failure of its introduction in the United States has been attributed to its character as a federal political system and the unpopularity of regressive indirect taxes in the country. However, very little is known about why many countries have adopted VATs while several countries have not or failed. The purpose of this session is to discuss (1) the causes of the diffusion of VAT at the national/federal level among 160 countries, (2) the unpopularity and the failure of its introduction in several countries such as the United States and Japan, and (3) historical consequences the choice of each country has provided such as taxpayer resistance and the hardship of middle class. Papers in this session do so by taking an historical and comparative approach and focusing on the historical, social, and political process how each country has succeeded or failed in obtaining taxpayer consent to the VAT and its introduction and expansion. The papers of this session also examine how important tax systems and tax ideas in other countries have influenced the policymaking process of tax system. In addition, this session attempts to provide policy implications that may enable the state to enhance the extractive capacity and taxpayer consent to its tax system. The products of this session will contribute to the literature of the VAT at the national, regional, and global level. Furthermore, they will help scholars who specialize in public finance, political science, sociology, and history re-emphasize the importance of taxing and spending in each state's history of public finance in terms of the history of tax thoughts, international relations, and the state itself.