Neither trade nor tax are new issues. What is new are the types of challenges that digital trade poses to revenue collection. As the digital economy has grown significantly, governments have watched with increasing dismay as taxes have not been collected from a steeply growing volume of transactions. Fiscal pressures in the wake of pandemic spending have accelerated the quest to appropriately tax companies and purchases made in the digital or online environment. The rise of the digital economy has complicated the traditional tax environment. Firms can be located anywhere and provide goods and services online to suppliers, vendors and customers in places without any need for a physical presence. The digital economy allows firms to scale up substantially at often minimal direct costs, creating a small set of super firms generating outsized profits. Such technology or digital firms present tempting targets for cash-strapped governments looking for revenue. However, it is not just large firms that can take advantage of new ways to find customers. A vital aspect of the digital economy is how it enables even the smallest companies to engage in cross-border trade. Firms that might never have been tempted to trade outside their own villages are increasingly finding key markets halfway around the globe. In short, there are at least four important ways that the digital economy has affected traditional tax systems: by allowing firms to compete in markets without a physical presence; by the proliferation of approaches, mostly used by large firms, to more carefully manage tax; companies that can operate with no or minimal presence; and by the participation in cross-border trade by companies previously not engaged in such transactions. Our latest paper, published this week with the Hinrich Foundation as part of the ongoing series on digital trade issues in Asia, highlights some of the current and upcoming issues of digital tax under both direct and indirect tax collection schemes.
MSMEs: Not Just Baskets and Potatoes
Why is it that so many officials (especially) assume that small businesses only make handicrafts or grow potatoes? Small companies do, of course, create all sorts of fantastic products including handicrafts. But they also do so much more. Even in developing countries and least developed countries, small firms deliver services and create products that can be incredibly sophisticated and complex. The idea that micro, small and medium sized enterprises (MSMEs) only operate in handicrafts and basic agricultural products warps policy responses. Policy that accommodates just two types of outcomes for smaller firms leaves huge swathes of MSMEs outside policy frameworks. Government ends up crafting programs and solutions to problems that may be completely inappropriate or potentially counterproductive for the majority of firms in the marketplace.