The Optimal Grouping of Commodities for Indirect Taxation

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 number of tax rates and study theoptimal aggregation (or classification) of commodities of the fiscal authority in asecond best setup. The results are illustrated on data from the United Kingdom.