A Better Local Business Tax: The BVT

Richard Bird

No 18, IMFG Papers from University of Toronto, Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance

Abstract: This paper makes the case for a new tax for local government: the Business Value Tax (BVT). The BVT is a value added tax (VAT) like the Canadian federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) and the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) used in some provinces, but it taxes business income rather than sales. The author concludes that a local BVT is economically preferable to other forms of local business tax, administratively manageable, and could be politically desirable – especially for large cities and metropolitan regions with urban infrastructure investment needs. It outlines how the tax works, shows how it differs from the GST/ HST, and discusses the experience with BVT-like taxes in several countries.

Keywords: tax; business value tax; large cities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 H72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published in hard copy and online

Downloads: (external link)
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/ ... rd_may%2030_2014.pdf First version, 2014 (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:mfg:wpaper:18

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMFG Papers from University of Toronto, Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Enid Slack ().