【Empirical/Trade Seminar】Tax Incidence of VAT Enforcement Reform for Foreign Services and Small Businesses in Two-sided Markets
2025/09/12
研討會日期 : 2025-09-12
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Yukihiro Nishimura
地點 : Conference Room B110
主持人 : Professor Shin-Kun Peng
演講者簡介 : Professor Yukihiro Nishimura received his Ph.D. in Economics from Queen's University in 2002. He is currently a Professor at Osaka University. His research interests are Tax Competition, Political Economics, Public Good Provision, Fiscal Federalism, and Optimal Taxation.
演講摘要 : Value-added tax (VAT) faces two major enforcement challenges: taxing foreign vendors without local subsidiaries and taxing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited tax bases. As a response, several countries have adopted platform-based VAT collection systems, requiring online platforms to remit VAT on behalf of foreign firms and SMEs. We develop a model of a monopolistic online platform that sets commission rates for a relation-specific good and the price of a standard good. We show that taxing foreign content developers via the platform increases the tax burden on the standard good, despite no change in its statutory VAT rate. Moreover, we find that the benefit of closing VAT loopholes through platform taxation critically depends on the elasticity of developer entry with respect to the size of the user network. These insights suggest a non-linear relationship between the tax rates and the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) in platform economies. Due to the simultaneity of price and quantity, a more fully fledged structural analysis may be necessary for the estimation of MVPF. Furthermore, we demonstrate that VAT can function as a Pigouvian tax by mitigating excessive entry, and our results remain robust even under conditions of platform competition. With online apps as a representative example, the welfare effects of price ceiling policies are also examined. Suppose the network-size externality on apps' demand is stronger than the app variety's network externality. In that case, the price ceiling on the network good, not on the commission fee, increases both the producer surplus of the app developers and the consumer surplus of the end-users. By the level of the unconstrained equilibrium commission fee, a regulator can identify which policy can make both consumers and developers better off.
