The partial revenue from each indirect tax and the total revenue from all indirect taxes on consumer goods are derived as functions of all commodity prices, the tax rates of each commodity, total expenditure and demographic variables using a complete demand system. Within this framework we define Dupuit curves, or Laffer curves, and analyze their existence and maximum points theoretically and empirically. The macro demand system is based on exact aggregation across all households in the economy, and on exact aggregation across commodities within a detailed non-homogeneous utility tree. An empirical application for Norway with 55 commodity groups is presented. For beer, wine, spirits and tobacco, consumers can choose among buying at home, cross-border shopping/ tax-free shopping and smuggling. These substitution possibilities increase substantially the price elasticities for these goods. The partial revenue from wine as function of the tax share on wine has a single maximum value close to the actual tax rate in Norway in 1999, conditioned on all the other exogenous variables. The total revenue as a function of the tax share on wine also has a single maximum value, larger than that for the partial revenue. The same results are valid for spirits. For beer and tobacco there is no revenue maximizing tax share.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Research Department of Statistics Norway in its series Discussion Papers with number
573.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: