VAT Exemptions: Consequences and Design Alternatives

This book is the only in-depth analysis of VAT to focus on exemptions as a whole. Ten chapters – by economists, lawyers, legal academics, and government tax advisors from a wide variety of jurisdictions – grapple with the essential questions: Are VAT exemptions desirable? Are they avoidable? Are alternative legal designs possible? Are such alternatives necessary? What new problems do such designs give rise to? The authors emphasize in particular the design alternatives to exemptions that characterize ‘modern’ VAT and the newly proposed ‘post-modern’ VAT, both those that are already in operation in some countries and others that have not yet been attempted anywhere in the world