The objective of this essay is to examine and explain possible drawbacks of the goods and services tax (GST) introduced in India on July 1, 2017. To get a comparative picture of its vulnerability to tax evasion, data for the OECD countries in the 1990s and also the Indian state VAT earlier this...

This paper extends the standard theoretical model of tax enforcement by allowing for the cross-matching of transactions in addition to the auditing of taxpayers. For the Value Added Tax (VAT) the matching of purchase and sales invoices is an important enforcement technique. The paper examines...

This is the draft of a chapter prepared for a forthcoming volume in memory of the late Amaresh Bagchi. The chapter focuses on important gaps in the coverage of typical undergraduate public economics courses if they are to remain relevant given the rapidly changing scope of the public sector the...

This paper proposes a method for evaluating the impact of tax structure changes on tax revenue. The technique consists of decomposing the gap between actual revenue and potential revenue into components attributable to changes in (i) the tax rate structure (ii) deductions and (iii) tax evasion....

This is the first study of compliance costs of income taxation of companies in India. These are costs to companies of obligations under income tax law and in planning to save taxes. Opportunity costs such as when tax refunds are delayed are also included. Different cost concepts include social...

Compliance Costs in Developed Countries varied between 3.91 percent of tax revenue in the UK in 1986-87 to between 7.9 to 10.8 percent in Australia in the 1990s. Compliance costs are incurred by taxpayers but also third parties who collect taxes (e.g. tax withholders) or who are required to...

The VAT is compared to a turnover tax (TT) given monopoly final goods and intermediate goods firms interacting strategically. Linear demands and constant costs are assumed. Via examples it is shown that for both "Cournot" and "Stackelberg" games, a revenue neutral VAT may not exist to a given...