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...

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...

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...

This paper analyzes revenue and welfare effects of implementing a FAT both from a theoretical and a quantitative perspective. The theoretical analysis allows us to derive expressions for the revenue effects and the deadweight loss in a general equilibrium setting, which can be quantified with a...

In this article, the author describes the differences between the Member States as regards the VAT regimes currently applicable to financial services and the existing problem that financial institutions, in particular businesses in the banking sector, cannot recover input VAT. In addition, he...