This paper examines alternatives to the exempt VAT treatment of public bodies, non-profit organizations and charitable organizations (public service bodies). It focuses in particular on the Canadian VAT (the federal Goods and Services Tax) and its treatment of transactions involving public...

In this paper we discuss some recent critical literature on VAT in developing countries relating to its revenue productivity, its equity, and its impact on the development of the formal economy. Illustrating our argument with reference to two recent country studies (of Ukraine and Jamaica) we...

The application of the value-added tax to public sector bodies, non-profit organizations and charitable organizations substantially departs from full taxation in most VAT regimes around the world. The problems with the mostly exempt regime for those organizations are reviewed. Options to modify...

How to tax financial services is in many ways the key frontier issue for VAT in developed countries. No convincing conceptually correct and practical solution for capturing the bulk of financial services under the VAT has yet been developed anywhere. Developing and transitional countries face...

How to tax financial services is in many ways the key ‘frontier’ issue for VAT in developed countries. No convincing conceptually correct and practical solution for capturing the bulk of financial services under the VAT has yet been developed anywhere. Developing and transitional countries...

An empirical model is developed to estimate the probability of a given tax status based on firm characteristics. A structural switching regression model of the firm’s demand for capital goods is next specified and incorporates expressions for the user cost of capital which account for tax...

Corporation tax systems around the world treat gains and losses asymmetrically. This paper examines the impact of changing the refundability of tax losses in a cash flow tax system. A dynamic game of complete information is used to analyse refund policies in an imperfectly competitive setting....

The biggest tax story of the last third of the 20 th century was the value-added tax (VAT). From its tentative beginnings in the reform of the French production tax in the early 1950s, by August 2000 some form of VAT existed in at least 123 countries. Few fiscal innovations have been adopted so...

Despite its complexity and the harsh reception the Canadian Goods and Services Tax (GST/HST) was greeted with at its inception in the early 1990s, the story emerging from Canada's value-added tax (VAT) experience is mostly a happy one. Indeed, a majority of the provinces will soon have replaced...