WIFO-Publikation: Implementation of a General Financial Transactions Tax

The study summarises the most significant observations about trading behaviour and price dynamics in financial markets. Against this background, the main objections to a general financial transactions tax (FTT) as put forward by the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission are evaluated. The main part of the study deals with the two different ways of how an FTT could be implemented. With the centralised approach, the tax is collected at point of settlement, either from the electronic settlement systems at exchanges, or from Central Counterparty Platforms (CCPs) in the case of over-the-counter (OTC) transactions, respectively. With the decentralised approach, the tax is deducted by the banks which transmit an order to an exchange or which carry out an OTC transaction. The centralised tax deduction would be optimal but requires a broad consensus among countries within the same trading time zone. By contrast, the decentralised approach could be implemented by a group of (EU or euro) countries without doing much harm to their own markets.

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