Applying Value Added Tax (VAT) to financial services is difficult. Several more or less complex methods for handling financial services within a VAT system have been developed, none of them being fully satisfactory. In 2018, Julio López-Laborda and Guillermo Peña have published “A New Method...

Financial services and insurance pose unique challenges for the design of a VAT. They represented 8.3% of the U.S. GDP for 2008. An economically neutral VAT should be imposed on supplies of financial and insurance services to the extent that these services belong in a consumption tax base and...

The EU VAT system, like many VAT systems around the world, exempts insurance and financial services. As opposed to merit goods or services, such as health or education, the rationale for exempting these services is not to diminish the regressivity of VAT, or to encourage their consumption, but...

An important question is whether VAT exemption of financial services is a desirable property or whether it is justified only due to practical and administrative necessity. This paper singles out a number of financial services for discussion of this issue in a context allowing for other taxes and...