Optimal Commodity Taxation of Traditional and Electronic Commerce

George Zodrow ()

Chapter 9 in Taxation in Theory and Practice:Selected Essays of George R Zodrow, 2019, pp 239-276 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: This paper examines theoretical arguments supporting preferential sales tax treatment of electronic commerce, using a version of the standard optimal commodity tax model that includes distributional concerns, tax-exempt goods, a subset of individuals with highly elastic demand for Internet goods (which are close but imperfect substitutes for similar goods sold by traditional retailers), and relatively high administrative costs of taxing electronic commerce. The analysis concludes that tax exemption of electronic commerce is unlikely to be even close to optimal, with the optimal tax differentials calculated suggesting that the traditional prescription of uniform taxation of traditional and electronic commerce should not be over ridden by optimal taxation concerns.

Keywords: Taxes; Taxation; Tax Reform; Consumption Taxation; State and Local Finance; Tax Competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789811205149_0009 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789811205149_0009 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
Journal Article: Optimal Commodity Taxation of Traditional and Electronic Commerce (2006)
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:wsi:wschap:9789811205149_0009

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().