In an earlier article titled as ‘Service Tax on Lawyers: A levy short lived?' [Excise and Customs Reporter Vol. 191(4), pp. 55SF-60SF] I had an occasion to point out that the levy of service tax on individual lawyers was an experiment out of the various experiments conducted by the Government...

The Constitution (One-Hundred and Twenty-Second Amendment) Bill, 2014 currently pending consideration of the Parliament seeks to usher a new indirect tax regime in India purported as the ‘Goods and Service Tax' The avowed intent of this Amendment Bill, in terms of its “Statement of Objects...

As the economy becomes global and ICT-reliant, approaches practiced in enterprise software product development and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementation must cope with increasingly complex situations induced by contemporary supply chain and regulations. Compliance with...

This article is a commentary on the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union on the Vodafone case, C-74/78 on progressive turnover taxes.In our view, the Court’s decision provides clarifications for ascertaining the compatibility of domestic turnover taxes with the fundamental...

In this paper we evaluate the incidence of a large cut in the value-added tax (VAT) for French sit-down restaurants. In contrast to previous studies that focus on prices only, we estimate its effect on four groups: workers, firm owners, consumers and suppliers of material goods. Using a...

The economic consequences of the war in Ukraine are taking a toll on goods prices in Germany and elsewhere. Prices on energy inputs to production, heating and mobility have risen sharply as well as food prices. As a possible policy response to these rising prices, the reduction of the VAT to...

Consumption tax rates targeted at specific sectors are often reformed without empirical knowledge about the efficiency of these policies. This paper sheds light on the efficiency issue, the potential for welfare improving reform, by studying the incidence of value added taxes (VAT) on prices and...

On 3 June 2020, the German government announced a temporary value added tax (VAT) rate reduction. VAT rates were reduced on 1 July 2020 and went back to their previous level on 1 January 2021. We study the price effects of the temporary VAT rate reduction using a web-scraped data set covering...

In July 2020, the UK government reduced the VAT rate on hospitality services from 20% to 5%, as response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We compile a novel dataset of detailed hotel room characteristics around this policy action in order to estimate how much the tax cut was passed on to consumers via...

This paper studies comprehensive national panel data of local option sales taxes at the monthly frequency. I calculate state-by-month population weighted averages of local sales tax rates. I document ten stylized facts concerning the time series patterns and spatial dynamics of local sales...