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Implications of Electronic Commerce for Fiscal Policy

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Cyber Policy and Economics in an Internet Age

Part of the book series: Topics in Regulatory Economics and Policy Series ((TREP,volume 43))

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Abstract

Partly as the result of historical circumstance, most people in the United States are not paying sales taxes on their purchases over the Internet. As a result, state and local officials are quite agitated that the rise of the Internet will severely erode the state and local tax base. Their fear, as spelled out by Newman (1995), is that “state and local government finances are becoming road kill on the information superhighway.” Although sales taxes on physical goods have received most of the attention, other tax issues such as the taxation of Internet access and international taxation of Internet commerce are also important.

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McQuivey, James, with Gillian DeMoulin. 2000. States Lose Half a Billion in Taxes to Web Retail. Technographics Brief. Forrester, Cambridge, Mass. (24 February).

    Google Scholar 

  • Newman, Nathan. 1995. Prop 13 Meets the Internet: How State and Local Government Finances are Becoming Road Kill on the Information Superhighway. Mimeo. Center for Community Economic Research, University of California, Berkeley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nordan, Matthew M., Cliff Condon, Abigail Leland, and Wouter Aghina. 2000. Retail’s Pan-European Future. The Forrester Report (April).

    Google Scholar 

  • Nordhaus, William. 2000. E-Commerce and Taxation. Mimeo. Yale University (9 June).

    Google Scholar 

  • Pastore, Michael. 1999. Sales Tax Would Hurt E-Commerce. (19 September).

    Google Scholar 

  • Prem, Richard, et al. 1999. Establishing a Framework to Evaluate E-Commerce Tax Policy Options. Report of Deloitte and Touche and University of California at Berkeley (December).

    Google Scholar 

  • Romer, Paul. 1994. New Goods, Old Theory, and the Welfare Costs of Trade Restrictions. Journal of Development Economics 43: 5–38.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tedeschi, Bob. 2000. Some Retailers Go against the Grain in Integrating Their Online Operations. New York Times (5 June).

    Google Scholar 

  • Trandel, Gregory. 1992. Evading the Use Tax on Cross-Border Sales: Pricing and Welfare Effects. Journal of Public Economics 35: 333–354.

    Google Scholar 

  • U.S. Bureau of the Census. Monthly Retail Sales. Various Issues. Bureau of the Census. Washington, D.C.

    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

  • Varian, Hal. 1999. Estimating the Demand for Bandwidth. Mimeo, University of California (August).

    Google Scholar 

  • Varian, Hal. 2000. Taxation of Electronic Commerce. Mimeo. University of California (March).

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Seema, David Cooperstein, David Weisman, and Thalika Oum. 1999. Post-Web Retail. The Forrester Report (September).

    Google Scholar 

  • Zodrow, George. 2000. Network Externalities and Preferential Taxation of E-Com-merce. Mimeo. Rice University.

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, USA

    Austan Goolsbee

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  1. Austan Goolsbee
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

    William H. Lehr

  2. Telecom Italia, Italy

    Lorenzo M. Pupillo

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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Goolsbee, A. (2002). Implications of Electronic Commerce for Fiscal Policy. In: Lehr, W.H., Pupillo, L.M. (eds) Cyber Policy and Economics in an Internet Age. Topics in Regulatory Economics and Policy Series, vol 43. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3575-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3575-8_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-3577-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-3575-8

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