The assignment of revenues in most developing and transitional countries to the central government has arguably facilitated irresponsible behavior by some subnational governments. One way to relieve this problem is to strengthen subnational tax regimes. The paper proposes two approaches to...

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...

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...

Revenue and Gross State Domestic Product data for 1993-94 to 2008-09 are used to study the revenue performance of the state Value-Added Tax (VAT) in India's 29 states. Both the direct revenue impact and the indirect impact through the VAT base were assessed. No indirect impact of the VAT on its...

This study reviews the effectiveness of state level tax administrations in India with reference to their implementation of a goods only Value-Added Tax (VAT), mostly in 2005. The study takes advantage of state by state audits evaluating the transition to the VAT from the predecessor sales tax...

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...

We describe the simple analytics of the four main types of sales taxes under revenue neutrality: the retail sales tax, the value added tax, a cascading sales tax and a manufacturers' sales tax. The retail sales tax is shown to be equivalent to a value added tax. In order to produce equal...