Optimal grouping of commodities for indirect taxation

Pascal Belan (1) , Stéphane Gauthier (2, 3) , Guy Laroque (3, 4)

1 LEMNA - Laboratoire d'économie et de management de Nantes Atlantique
2 ENSAE Paris - École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique
3 CREST-INSEE - Centre de Recherche en Economie et en Statistique
4 Department of Economics

Indirect taxes contribute to a sizeable part of government revenues around the world. Typically there are few different tax rates, and the goods are partitioned into classes associated with each rate. The present paper studies how to group the goods in these few classes. We take as given the number of tax rates and study the optimal aggregation (or classification) of commodities of the fiscal authority in a second best setup. The results are illustrated on data from the United Kingdom.

Mots clés: Indirect tax; Ramsey; Aggregation

Domaines: Economies et finances

Pascal Belan, Stéphane Gauthier, Guy Laroque. Optimal grouping of commodities for indirect taxation. Journal of Public Economics, 2008, 92 (7), pp.1738-1750. ⟨10.1016/j.jpubeco.2008.01.010⟩. ⟨hal-00731151⟩