2.1 VAT Works
As the background paper shows, VAT is by no means necessarily the ‘money machine’ that it has sometimes been called. The effects on revenue of introducing a VAT in particular contexts remains a matter open to interpretation and question, as recently underlined by some who have questioned the capability of VAT to replace revenues from trade liberalization in some DTE (e.g. Rajaraman, 2004). While it is true that there may indeed be a somewhat stronger case for retaining some taxation on international trade on revenue grounds than has been conventionally asserted, this case rests less on defects of VAT as such than on the assumed relative inefficiency of VAT administration compared to border tax administration (see also section 2.4). If a VAT can be administered adequately, the conventional conclusion that it offers the best way for a country to make up revenue losses from trade liberalization holds, though perhaps in less sweeping terms than originally argued .Indeed, the equally conventional conclusion that a VAT is the most economically desirable and administratively effective way in which to collect a given share of national income through a general consumption tax also holds -provided, again, that the capacity exists to administer VAT adequately. When a country introduces a VAT, whether to replace another form of general sales tax or as a new tax, there need not necessarily be an aggregate increase in revenues (either from consumption taxes or in general).As a rule, however, the economic cost of collecting revenues will decline, thus making society better off. Similarly, as with any tax, although increasing the rate of an existing VAT rates will neither necessarily increase revenues proportionately nor be costless, it may nonetheless be the economically most sensible way to expand revenue shares in DTE, if that is the policy goal.
2.2 But It Does Not Always Work
More generally, as hinted earlier, what is really at issue in such countries is not so much such specific problems -- all of which may in principle easily be corrected if desired -- but rather the fundamental question of whether they are really ready for the ‘self-assessment’ approach that the background paper properly asserts is how a ‘good’ VAT works. If a country is not ready in this regard, should if have a VAT at all? And, if it does (as many already do), is the best VAT for it always the same as the ‘model’ implicitly set out as a standard in most of the literature? The question is discussed further in the next two sections.
vb企业工资管理系统+源码+需求分析2.3. Tax Design: The NOSFA Principle
A second possibly rewarding approach to explore would be to recast the familiar (if implicit) ‘decision-tree’ approach to VAT by setting out in more detail the implications of different nodal decisions (e.g. zero-rating) for other design aspects, then working out the optimal sequence of such decisions for particular countries (or groups of countries), and finally assessing how dependent the ‘rightness’ of particular decisions is with respect to different characteristics of the environment within which the VAT is expected to function. While of course many elements of such an approach are to be found in the literature (e.g. Ebrill, 2001), as yet little has been done to set out the relevant decision-points and their interdependence in a systematic fashion or to quantify them in any meaningful way, although the interesting recent work on VAT thresholds (Keen and Mintz, 2003) is a good first step in this direction. Many more such steps are needed.
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