هماهنگ سازی مالیات بر کالا و محل صنعت

We study the positive implications of commodity taxation and tax harmonization under the destination and origin principles when firms are monopolistic competitors facing variable demand elasticity and segmented markets. Our emphasis is on the international location of firms in the presence of market size asymmetries and trade costs. Under the destination principle, an increase in the tax rate of a country always causes some firms to relocate to the other. This effect may be reversed under the origin principle when economic integration is deep enough. Under tax harmonization the choice of a common tax principle is irrelevant for the market outcomes and for the global tax revenues. It affects, however, the distribution of revenues between small and large countries.

The issue of VAT harmonization within the European Union (henceforth, EU) has attracted considerable attention and generated heated debates in the political arena (European Commission, 2000). Commodity taxation has raised similar passion in the United States, where e-commerce has created significant pressures on existing cross-border tax systems (Goolsbee, 2001). Central to the debates are two key questions on designing indirect taxation in the international context (Keen et al., 2002). The first question asks where taxes should be levied. Two alternative regimes are traditionally considered, depending on the founding principle. Under the ‘destination or consumption-based principle’ (DP) tax is paid in the country where goods are consumed at the rate applied there, while under the ‘origin or production-based principle’ (OP) tax is paid in the country where goods are produced at that country's rate. Accordingly, local consumption is taxed and exports are exempted under DP while local production is taxed and imports are exempted under OP. The second question asks whether tax rates should be set independently by national governments or rather harmonized across countries.

We have studied the positive implications of commodity taxation and tax harmonization under the destination and origin principles when firms are monopolistic competitors facing variable demand elasticity and segmented markets. Our emphasis has been on the international location of firms in the presence of market size asymmetries and trade costs. Under the destination principle, an increase in the tax rate of a country always causes some firms to relocate to the other. This effect may be reversed under the origin principle when economic integration is deep enough. Under tax harmonization the choice of a common tax principle is irrelevant for the market outcomes and for the global tax revenues. It affects, however, the distribution of revenues between small and large countries, with the former favoring the destination principle and the latter the origin principle.