TO TAX OR NOT TO TAX? THE CASE OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

Donald Bruce, William Fox and Matthew Murray ()

Contemporary Economic Policy, 2003, vol. 21, issue 1, 25-40

Abstract: Despite the intensifying debate over the taxation of Internet commerce, the relevant issues have not been given a systematic treatment in the context of the literature on optimal taxation. This article presents such an analysis and investigates separately the taxation of business purchases of intermediate goods, the taxation of consumer purchases of final goods and services, and the various issues of administration and compliance costs as they apply to the development of E‐commerce. The authors conclude that generally the optimal tax literature cannot be used in support of a blanket tax exemption for Internet purchases. Certain conditions could lead to the optimality of an exemption, but those conditions are not likely to be met in practice.

Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1093/cep/21.1.25

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:bla:coecpo:v:21:y:2003:i:1:p:25-40

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://ordering.onl ... 5-7287&ref=1465-7287

Access Statistics for this article

Contemporary Economic Policy is currently edited by Brad R. Humphreys

More articles in Contemporary Economic Policy from Western Economic Association International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().