Five Years of Digital Services Taxes in Europe: What Have We Learned?

Abstract

This article aims to assess whether digital services taxes (DSTs) have been effective in achieving their policy goals as well as identify key unresolved questions and highlight how the evidence from five years of DSTs’ existence in Europe can help in resolving them. The article analyses DSTs’ key policy goals with a particular focus on the equalization of the tax gap and creating fair taxation in the context of a tax incidence. It is based on publicly available data related to introducing five selected DSTs based on the similarity of both their design and the economic situation of the countries in which they were introduced. The collected revenue, fiscal efficiency of these taxes, and taxpayers’ reactions strongly indicate that DSTs have been passed on to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and consumers to a great extent while yielding negligible revenues that contradicts their policy goals. Due to limitations in data availability and the occurrence of two significant disruptions in the economy during the analysed period, some questions remain unanswered. Therefore, in the context of theoretical economic literature applicable to the case of DSTs, this author indicates where additional in-depth research and governmental analysis of DSTs is necessary and what the possible approaches are to obtain sufficient grounds for political decisions regarding introducing similar measures.