as well as that from the peer review of this methodology provided by Richard Bird, Norman Gemmell and Søren Pedersen. The support and feedback from all the countries which have participated thus far in the program is also gratefully acknowledged.
Structural transformation has resulted in an increasing share of services in output and employment in advanced and developing countries across the world. We analyse the impact of this shift into services on countries' efficiency in collecting the value‐added tax (VAT). The analysis is based on two alternative measures of VAT productivity: (a) the VAT C‐efficiency, using a broad panel of 134 countries over the period 1970–2014 and (b) the VAT gap using a more granular, proprietary data set that draws on the results of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) Revenue Administration‐Gap Analysis Program covering 24 countries over the period 2004–2016. We find that a higher share of services in aggregate value‐added reduces the VAT efficiency, and that this adverse effect is mainly a result of a rise of nontradable services which in turn contributes to a narrowing of the VAT base.
Structural transformation has resulted in an increasing share of services in aggregate valueadded in advanced and developing countries across the world. We analyze the impact of this shift into services on countries' efficiency in collecting the value-added tax (VAT). The analysis is based on two alternative measures of VAT efficiency: (1) the VAT C-efficiency, using a broad panel of 134 countries over the period 1970-2014; and (2) the VAT gap using a more granular, proprietary dataset that draws on the results of IMF's Revenue Administraion-Gap Analysis Program covering 24 countries over the period 2004-2016. We find that a higher share of services in aggregate value-added reduces the VAT efficiency, and that this adverse effect is mainly a result of a rise of non-tradable services, which in turn contributes to a narrowing of the VAT base. JEL Classification Numbers: E32, H2, H21, H25 , and the participants at a seminar at the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund for their insightful comments and suggestions.
This paper argues that whether estimates of the welfare cost of natural or artificial trade barriers that do not discriminate by quality are subject to positive or negative specification bias when using models which do not explicitly recognize quality variation depends on the reference point used in couriterfactual equilibrium analysis. We use numerical general equilibrium techniques to generate counter examples to the widely held view that (in the competitive case) incorporating quality upgrading will tend to reduce the welfare costs of quality invariant trade barriers. To do this, we use a trade-distorted equilibrium as the reference point; rather than free trade.
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