Time Use and Food Taxation in Spain

Javier Ferri, María Luisa Moltó and Ezequiel Uriel ()

FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis, 2009, vol. 65, issue 3, 313-334

Abstract: We evaluate the welfare impact of changing the VAT on food in a context in which households can produce home meals for own consumption that compete with meals served in restaurants. Home production of meals requires the combination of food and time inputs. The fiscal treatment in home production of both the inputs and the final product differs from market production of meals, generating different channels of inefficiency. We calibrate a simple general-equilibrium model for the Spanish economy that identifies three types of consumers according to their income, and simulate the effects of some experiments related to how food is taxed. The results suggest that if we focus only on aggregate welfare, the model fails to capture important distributional issues. We also present some caveats to previous simulation results on aggregate welfare that are related to the importance of the elasticity of substitution between food and time in the household production of meals.

Keywords: household production; optimal taxation; incidence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C68 D13 H21 H22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/article/time-use-an ... 1628001522109x477796 (text/html)
Fulltext access is included for subscribers to the printed version.

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:mhr:finarc:urn:sici:0015-2218(200909)65:3_313:tuafti_2.0.tx_2-u

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG, P.O.Box 2040, 72010 Tübingen, Germany

DOI: 10.1628/001522108X477796

Access Statistics for this article

FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis is currently edited by Alfons Weichenrieder, Ronnie Schöb and Jean-François Tremblay

More articles in FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis from Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Wolpert ().