Modern Tax Theory and Institutional Innovation is a core degree course for master’s students in Applied Economics, charged with connecting the discipline’s four research directions: the modern fiscal and taxation system, digital finance, the international economy and the evolution of business, and industrial digitalization and regional innovation. Faced with the high-frequency iteration of institutions—value-added tax (VAT) legislation, consumption-tax reform, and the international “Two-Pillar” tax overhaul, among others—the traditional teaching model, organized around textbook chapters and dominated by the exposition of statutory provisions, is systematically misaligned with the goal of cultivating graduate students’ capacity for innovation, across teaching content, teaching methods, and assessment. On the basis of an analysis of the course’s characteristics and pedagogical pain points, this paper proposes a reform approach grounded in the core principles of “problem orientation, research–teaching integration, and outcomes orientation,” threaded throughout by the central thesis that “institutional innovation is essentially the outcome of a multi-party game among the central government, local governments, and enterprises.” It sets out concrete reform measures along six dimensions—content restructuring and dynamic updating, seminar-based and project-based teaching, research–teaching integration, digital empowerment, the organic embedding of ideological-political education, and diversified process-oriented assessment—and concludes by discussing the reform’s effects, real-world challenges, and directions for continuous improvement, with a view to offering a reference for the pedagogical reform of comparable frontier-oriented, institution-focused graduate courses.

Xiaojing Fan. Teaching Reform of a Graduate Course in Modern Tax Theory and Institutional Innovation: A Problem-Oriented and Research-Integrated Framework. Frontiers in Educational Research (2026), Vol. 9, Issue 8: 8-13. https://doi.org/10.25236/FER.2026.090802.

[1] Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. Value-Added Tax Law of the People’s Republic of China. Adopted December 25, 2024; effective January 1, 2026.

[2] State Council of the People’s Republic of China. Implementing Regulations of the Value-Added Tax Law of the People’s Republic of China. Effective January 1, 2026.

[3] Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Decision on Further Deepening Reform Comprehensively to Advance Chinese Modernization. 2024.

[4] OECD. Tax Challenges Arising from the Digitalisation of the Economy — Global Anti-Base Erosion Model Rules (Pillar Two). Paris: OECD Publishing, 2021; Administrative Guidance, 2026.