Financial Transactions Taxes: an Outdated Tool?

Résumé 0

This paper proposes an overview of what we currently know about financial transactions taxes (FTT). I discuss to what extent an FTT can be seen as an efficient tool to fulfill three types of objectives: (1) correcting market failures; (2) redistributing economic resources; (3) financing public expenditures efficiently. Using recent research papers and some new simple computations based on the French FTT, I conclude that an FTT doesn’t really seem to fulfill any of these three categories of objectives. This article concludes that, rather than applying the old idea of an FTT, policymakers could use more modern and targeted tools to achieve the same objectives more efficiently. JEL Codes: G10, G14, G18, H32.