IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/uwarer/271180.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Opting for Opting In? An Evaluation of the European Commission’s Proposals for Reforming VAT on Financial Services

Author

Listed:
  • de la Feria, Rita
  • Lockwood, Ben

Abstract

This paper provides a legal and economic analysis of the European Commission’s recent proposals for reforming the application of VAT to financial services, with particular focus on their “third pillar”, under which firms would be allowed to opt-into taxation on exempt insurance and financial services. From a legal perspective, we show that the proposals’ “first and second pillar” would give rise to considerable interpretative and qualification problems, resulting in as much complexity and legal uncertainty as the current regime. Equally, an option to tax could potentially follow significantly different legal designs, which would give rise to discrepancies in the application of the option amongst Member States. On the economic side, we show that quite generally, when firms cannot coordinate their behaviour, they have an individual incentive to opt-in on business-to-business (B2B) transactions, but not on business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. We also show that opting in eliminates the cost disadvantage that EU financial services firms face in competing with foreign firms for B2B sales. But, these results do not hold if firms can coordinate their behaviour. An estimate of the upper bound on the amount of tax revenue that might be lost from allowing opting-in is provided for a number of EU countries.

Suggested Citation

  • de la Feria, Rita & Lockwood, Ben, 2010. "Opting for Opting In? An Evaluation of the European Commission’s Proposals for Reforming VAT on Financial Services," Economic Research Papers 271180, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:ags:uwarer:271180
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.271180
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/271180/files/twerp_927.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/271180/files/twerp_927.pdf?subformat=pdfa
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.271180?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
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Ben Lockwood, 2010. "How Should Financial Intermediation Services be Taxed?," Working Papers 1014, Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation.
    2. Giancarlo Corsetti & Michael P. Devereux & John Hassler & Gilles Saint-Paul & Hans-Werner Sinn & Jan-Egbert Sturm & Xavier Vives, 2011. "Chapter 5: Taxation and Regulation of the Financial Sector," EEAG Report on the European Economy, CESifo, vol. 0, pages 147-169, February.
    3. 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.
    4. 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).
    5. Gabriel RAITA, 2021. "A Theoretical Approach Of The Fiscal System In Romania," Annales Universitatis Apulensis Series Oeconomica, Faculty of Sciences, "1 Decembrie 1918" University, Alba Iulia, vol. 1(23), pages 1-5.
    6. 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.
    7. Michael Firth & Kenneth McKenzie, 2012. "The GST and Financial Services: Pausing for Perspective," SPP Research Papers, The School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, vol. 5(29), September.
    8. Joaquim Sarmento, 2016. "The Determinants Of Value Added Tax Revenues In The European Union," Portuguese Journal of Management Studies, ISEG, Universidade de Lisboa, vol. 21(2), pages 79-99.
    9. Sijbren Cnossen, 2013. "A proposal to apply the Kiwi-VAT to insurance services in the European Union," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 20(5), pages 867-883, October.
    10. 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.
    11. 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.
    12. Leon Bettendorf & Sijbren Cnossen, 2014. "The Long Arm of the European VAT, Exemplified by the Dutch Experience," CESifo Working Paper Series 4730, CESifo.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Financial Economics;

    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:ags:uwarer:271180. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/ .

    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.