Despite its complexity and the harsh reception the Canadian Goods and Services Tax (GST/HST) was greeted with at its inception in the early 1990s, the story emerging from Canada's value-added tax (VAT) experience is mostly a happy one. Indeed, a majority of the provinces will soon have replaced...

For decades, the conventional view was that one could not impose a standard invoice-credit destination-based value added tax (VAT) at the subnational level of government. Canada's almost two decades of experience with just such a VAT demonstrates conclusively that this view is incorrect. Not...

In the post-COVID-19 environment, policy makers in many countries will be searching for revenues. Due to the political difficulty of creating new taxes or raising existing ones significantly, the focus may well shift to improving the yield of existing or reformed taxes. We explore VAT revenue...

With the federal government projecting swelling budget deficits in the Fall Economic Statement and then the 2021 Budget due to pandemic relief measures, debate is shifting to the revenue raising measures needed to pay for them. But before raising broad-based taxes, governments should evaluate...

This paper examines alternatives to the exempt VAT treatment of public bodies, non-profit organizations and charitable organizations (public service bodies). It focuses in particular on the Canadian VAT (the federal Goods and Services Tax) and its treatment of transactions involving public...

The biggest tax story of the last third of the 20 th century was the value-added tax (VAT). From its tentative beginnings in the reform of the French production tax in the early 1950s, by August 2000 some form of VAT existed in at least 123 countries. Few fiscal innovations have been adopted so...

Richard Bird’s considerable and lasting contributions to the value-added tax (VAT) field and his influence in the real world were, to a significant extent, a result of his intellectual curiosity, his discipline, and the rules of engagement in research that he followed himself and expected his...

In this paper we discuss some recent critical literature on VAT in developing countries relating to its revenue productivity, its equity, and its impact on the development of the formal economy. Illustrating our argument with reference to two recent country studies (of Ukraine and Jamaica) we...

Corporation tax systems around the world treat gains and losses asymmetrically. This paper examines the impact of changing the refundability of tax losses in a cash flow tax system. A dynamic game of complete information is used to analyse refund policies in an imperfectly competitive setting....