Indirect taxes contribute to a sizeable part of government revenues around theworld. Typically there are a few different tax rates, and the goods are partitionedinto classes associated with each rate. The present paper studies how to group thegoods in these few classes. We take as given the...

The literature on indirect taxation is usually concerned with the casewhere the number of possible di¤erent tax rates equals the number of commodities.The purpose of this paper is to characterize, in a partial equilibrium framework,which commodities should be taxed at the same rate whenever...