Is VAT also a corporate tax? Untangling tax burdens and benefits for companies

Ian Roxan

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The Great Financial Crisis has increased concerns about whether corporations are paying a ‘fair’ amount of tax in different countries. This begs the question of what a ‘fair’ amount of tax is. The question is complicated by the continuing lack of clarity about the economic incidence of corporate income tax. Recently, it has been argued that the location of the sales revenue (turnover) of a corporation is relevant in determining the fair allocation. Of course, in many countries there is already a tax based on sales, value-added tax (VAT), also called goods and services tax (GST). This paper explores an illustration, arising from a series of cases before the European Court of Justice, of how VAT can impose a burden on corporations. The illustration raises issues of principle for VAT, but also offers lessons about how we tax corporations, particularly given proposals such as for digital sales taxes in the EU and the idea of a destination-based cash-flow tax included in legislative proposals in the US in 2016. This article explores the puzzles raised by the illustration and shows how it can throw light not only on the nature of VAT but also on the incidence of corporate income tax.

Keywords: value added tax; corporate income tax; holding companies; economic incidence of tax; globalisation and tax (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E6 J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2020-04-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-mac and nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/102723/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:102723

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().