Tax Avoidance and Value-Added vs. Income Taxation in an Open Economy

Roger Gordon and Søren Nielsen

No 5527, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Ignoring tax avoidance possibilities, a value-added tax and a cash-flow income tax have identical behavioral and distributional consequences. Yet the available means of tax avoidance under each are very different. Under a VAT, avoidance occurs through cross-border shopping, whereas under an income tax it occurs through shifting taxable income abroad. Given avoidance, we show that a country would make use of both taxes in order to minimize the efficiency costs of avoidance activity, relying relatively more on that tax that is harder to avoid. We then make use of aggregate Danish tax and accounting data from 1992 to measure the amount of avoidance that occurred under the two taxes. While the estimates of avoidance activity are small, the figures imply that Denmark could reduce the real costs of avoidance activity by putting more weight on income rather than value- added taxes.

JEL-codes: H21 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996-04
Note: PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Gordon, Roger H. and Soren Bo Nielsen. "Tax Evasion In An Open Economy: Value-Added Vs. Income Taxation," Journal of Public Economics, 1997, v66(2,Nov), 173-197.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5527.pdf (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:nbr:nberwo:5527

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5527

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().