The sales taxes in the EU - and in several other countries - are practiced as value-added tax of the consumption type with invoice method. Literature on microsimulation models (MSM) for this type of VAT is rare, though the importance of VAT has continuously increased. We discuss the issues of...

The sales taxes in the EU|and in several other countries|are practiced as value-added tax of the consumption type with invoice method. Literature on microsimulation models (MSM) for this type of VAT is rare, though the importance of VAT has continuously increased. We discuss the issues of...

Similarly to many other European countries, Germany has experienced a considerable demographic shift since the 1970s: higher life expectancy and diminishing birth rates, only partly balanced by immigration, have led to an altered population structure with an increasing share of elderly people....

Tax reform is a permanent topic of the economic policy debate in Germany. The paper presents a radical reform proposal (as well as a survey of other proposals) and describes some steps towards the realization of the proposal. The tax system proposed mainly consists of a value added tax, a flat...

Ontario's new Harmonized Sales Tax applies to a broader base of consumer purchases than before, but it also removes some of the “hidden” taxes on business inputs. This paper offers a first look at how the change has affected consumer prices and the welfare of Ontario families. While consumer...

In the tax policy debate, differentiation of value-added taxes is often justified by distributional concerns. Our quantitative analysis for Germany indicates that such concerns are misplaced. We find that the abolition of VAT differentiation has only negligible redistributive effects. Instead,...

We study the effects of consumption tax changes on prices and unit sales of durables utilizing micro-level product data. The results show that tax rate changes are fully shifted into prices. An anticipated tax rate change causes a temporary shift in unit sales shortly before implementation,...

If the desire is to provide tax relief to households with lower and middle incomes in Germany, it is necessary to target the valueadded tax rather than the personal income tax. Lowering the standard value-added tax rate by one percentage point (from 19 to 18 percent) would mean relief worth 11...

The central argument of this paper is that Canada should better align provincial own-source revenues with provincial expenditures by turning over the GST to the provinces while simultaneously reducing federal transfers. The paper begins by broadly outlining of Canada's present fiscal...

We study theoretically and numerically the effects of an environmental tax reform using endogenous growth theory. In the theoretical part, mobile labor between manufacturing and R&D activities, and elasticity of substitution between labor and energy in manufacturing lower than unity allow for a...