Efficient Tax Exporting.

In a multijurisdiction economy with free mobility of households between communities, some portion of any community's tax is incident upon nonresident landowners. It is shown that when the objective of a community is taken to be the level of satisfaction of its residents, a fully efficient allocation is a (Nash) equilibrium of the decentralized game. In general, no local tax structure that restricts a community's tax base to residents can attain the optimum; thus, tax exporting is necessary for independent local government behavior to be consistent with efficiency.

VAT Refunds

A key feature of the invoice-credit form of value-added tax (VAT) is that some businesses- notably exporters-will pay more tax on their purchases than is due on their sales, and so can seek refunds of excess credits from government. While refunding is straightforward in principle, serious problems arise in practice, including opportunities for fraud and corruption, and denial of refunds by governments with cash shortages. This makes the refund process the "Achilles heel" of the VAT. This paper examines the refund approaches of tax administrations in 36 developing, transitional, and developed countries. It evaluates the effectiveness of these approaches and suggests a model of best practice that takes into consideration compliance issues faced by countries during different stages of development.Value added tax;vat, tax administration, tax administrations, tax authorities, tax authority, checking, vat revenue, tax liabilities, vat system, tax officials, vat compliance, taxpayer compliance, input tax credit, taxpayer compliance costs, tax obligations, taxpayer groups, taxpayer identification numbers, taxable activities, tax liability, large taxpayers, spectrum, vat receipts, taxpayer identification, tax system, taxpayer accounting, costs of tax administration, vat rate, tax audits, tax collection, tax offices, vat net, tax systems, website, publishing, tax audit, tax assessment, indirect tax, tax arrears, databases, domestic tax, tax design, tax statutes, indirect taxes, tax compliance, tax evasion, taxpayers ? rights, tax type, input tax credits