IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/itaxpf/v21y2014i6p1028-1050.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Revenue and welfare effects of financial sector VAT exemption

Author

Listed:
  • Thiess Buettner
  • Katharina Erbe

Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of revenue and welfare effects associated with a VAT exemption of financial services, which is common among OECD countries. We follow a general equilibrium approach that considers effects of repealing the VAT exemption not only on consumer demand and intermediate-input demand for financial services, but takes account also of the VAT distortion of labor supply. We derive formal expressions for revenue and welfare effects, which can be quantified with a minimum of information about behavioral effects. Using VAT statistics as well as national accounts, we provide quantitative estimates of the effects of repealing the VAT exemption in Germany. Our baseline estimate indicates that tax revenues would increase by some €1.7 billion or 1.3 % of VAT revenues (excluding import turnover tax). Provided these revenue gains are used to finance a reduction in the VAT rate or in other distortive labor taxes our results indicate a modest welfare gain of about €1 billion, or 0.04 % of GDP. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Suggested Citation

  • Thiess Buettner & Katharina Erbe, 2014. "Revenue and welfare effects of financial sector VAT exemption," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 21(6), pages 1028-1050, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:itaxpf:v:21:y:2014:i:6:p:1028-1050
    DOI: 10.1007/s10797-013-9297-5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10797-013-9297-5
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10797-013-9297-5?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James R. Hines, 1999. "Three Sides of Harberger Triangles," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 13(2), pages 167-188, Spring.
    2. Rita de la Feria & Ben Lockwood, 2010. "Opting for Opting-In? An Evaluation of the European Commission's Proposals for Reforming VAT on Financial Services," Fiscal Studies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, vol. 31(2), pages 171-202, June.
    3. Lawrence H. Goulder & Roberton C. Williams III, 2003. "The Substantial Bias from Ignoring General Equilibrium Effects in Estimating Excess Burden, and a Practical Solution," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 111(4), pages 898-927, August.
    4. Alan J. Auerbach & Roger H. Gordon, 2002. "Taxation of Financial Services under a VAT," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(2), pages 411-416, May.
    5. Genser, Bernd & Winker, Peter, 1997. "Measuring the fiscal revenue loss of VAT exemption in commercial banking," Discussion Papers, Series II 342, University of Konstanz, Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 178 "Internationalization of the Economy".
    6. Michael P. Keane, 2011. "Labor Supply and Taxes: A Survey," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(4), pages 961-1075, December.
    7. Harry Huizinga, 2002. "A European VAT on financial services? [‘Taxation of financial services under a VAT’]," Economic Policy, CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po;CES;MSH, vol. 17(35), pages 497-534.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Thiess Buettner & Annalisa Tassi, 2023. "VAT fraud and reverse charge: empirical evidence from VAT return data," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 30(3), pages 849-878, June.
    2. Hendrik Hakenes & Eva Schliephake, 2021. "Responsible Investment and Responsible Consumption," ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series 134, University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany.
    3. Vidar Christiansen, 2017. "Indirect Taxation of Financial Services," CESifo Working Paper Series 6675, CESifo.
    4. Ben Lockwood & Erez Yerushalmi, 2019. "How should payment services be taxed?," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 53(1), pages 21-47, June.
    5. Gholami, Ahmad & Abasinejad, Hossein, 2016. "Implementation of Value-Added Tax on Iran Banking Services: An Application of DSGE Model," Journal of Money and Economy, Monetary and Banking Research Institute, Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, vol. 11(3), pages 283-303, July.
    6. Presiana Nenkova & Angel Angelov, 2019. "Assessing the Effects of Imposing VAT on the Services Provided by the Banking Sector – The Case of Bulgaria," Economic Studies journal, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences - Economic Research Institute, issue 3, pages 124-143.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bierbrauer, Felix, 2014. "Tax incidence for fragile financial markets," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 107-125.
    2. Erbe, Katharina & Büttner, Thiess, 2013. "FAT or VAT? The Financial Activities Tax as a Substitute to Imposing Value Added Tax on Financial Services," VfS Annual Conference 2013 (Duesseldorf): Competition Policy and Regulation in a Global Economic Order 79959, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    3. Felix Bierbrauer, 2012. "On the incidence of a financial transactions tax in a model with fire sales," Working Paper Series in Economics 55, University of Cologne, Department of Economics.
    4. Sajid M. Chaudhry & Andrew W. Mullineux & Natasha Agarwal, 2015. "Balancing the Regulation and Taxation of Banking," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 16668.
    5. Felix Bierbrauer, 2013. "Financial Transaction Taxes and Fire Sales," 2013 Meeting Papers 433, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    6. Presiana Nenkova & Angel Angelov, 2019. "Assessing the Effects of Imposing VAT on the Services Provided by the Banking Sector – The Case of Bulgaria," Economic Studies journal, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences - Economic Research Institute, issue 3, pages 124-143.
    7. Sørensen, Peter Birch, 2014. "Measuring the deadweight loss from taxation in a small open economy," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 115-124.
    8. López-Laborda, Julio & Peña, Guillermo, 2016. "Is financial VAT neutral to financial sector size?," Economics Discussion Papers 2016-31, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    9. Raj Chetty, 2009. "Sufficient Statistics for Welfare Analysis: A Bridge Between Structural and Reduced-Form Methods," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 451-488, May.
    10. Ismail Baydur & Fatih Yilmaz, 2021. "VAT Treatment of the Financial Services: Implications for the Real Economy," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 53(8), pages 2167-2200, December.
    11. Raj Chetty & Emmanuel Saez, 2010. "Dividend and Corporate Taxation in an Agency Model of the Firm," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 2(3), pages 1-31, August.
    12. Niels Johannesen, 2011. "Strategic Line Drawing between Debt and Equity," EPRU Working Paper Series 2011-04, Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU), University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
    13. Klotz, Richard & Bento, Antonio M. & Landry, Joel R., 2013. "Economic Insights Required for Using Lifecycle Analysis for Policy Decisions," 2014 Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) Annual Meeting, January 3-5, 2014, Philadelphia, PA 161654, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    14. Peter Birch Sørensen, 2011. "Measuring the Deadweight Loss from Taxation in a Small Open Economy. A general method with an application to Sweden," EPRU Working Paper Series 2011-03, Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU), University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
    15. Ofori, Roland O., 2023. "The economic cost of fuel subsidies in Ghana," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 87(PB).
    16. Kahana, Nava & Klunover, Doron, 2014. "Rent Seeking and the Excess Burden of Taxation," IZA Discussion Papers 8160, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    17. Raj Chetty & Emmanuel Saez, 2007. "An Agency Theory of Dividend Taxation," NBER Working Papers 13538, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Chugh, Randy & Cropper, Maureen, 2017. "The welfare effects of fuel conservation policies in a dual-fuel car market: Evidence from India," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 244-261.
    19. Ben Lockwood & Erez Yerushalmi, 2019. "How should payment services be taxed?," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 53(1), pages 21-47, June.
    20. Ms. Thornton Matheson, 2011. "Taxing Financial Transactions: Issues and Evidence," IMF Working Papers 2011/054, International Monetary Fund.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    VAT; Financial services; Exemption; General equilibrium; Deadweight loss; Input-output analysis; H24; H25;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H24 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies
    • H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:itaxpf:v:21:y:2014:i:6:p:1028-1050. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.