Cross‐Border Shopping and State Use Tax Liabilities: Evidence from eBay Transactions

Online commerce presents consumers with a convenient way of shopping outside of their local jurisdiction, and this online purchase decision is capable of affecting in significant ways the sales and use tax collections of state governments. However, the actual revenue impact has proven difficult to estimate. There is considerable work that examines the revenue impact of seller compliance with sales taxes. However, there is little work on buyer compliance with use taxes. In this paper, we investigate the potential impact of cross‐border shopping on state use tax liabilities of buyers, using data from the largest online consumer‐to‐consumer and business‐to‐consumer marketplace, eBay.com . We collect our own data on actual cross‐border shopping transactions from eBay, focusing upon a “representative” commodity classification and a “typical” day; these data consist of nearly 21,000 eBay listings generated by roughly 7,000 individual sellers with over 9,000 buyers. These data allow us to examine the extent of actual, not estimated, cross‐border shopping by buyers, and the subsequent potential impact of this cross‐border shopping on state use tax liabilities. Our results indicate that cross‐border shopping is highly prevalent on eBay, with out‐of‐state purchases accounting for on average 94 percent of the volume of a state's purchase transactions. Even so, given the limited volume of eBay‐based transactions relative to total sales transactions, the likely impact of cross‐border transactions on state use tax revenue streams is quite low, at least at present, typically less than one percent of actual state sales tax revenues.     

Russian Regions in Expanding Europe: The Pskov Connection

BARGAINING OVER POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC POWER between the federal government in Moscow and the 89 subjects of the Russian Federation is now widely considered as critical to the success of Russia's democratic and free market reforms, if not to Russia's enduring viability as a state.1 The key challenge to Moscow, and to Russia as a whole, is how to harmonise different levels of political control so that economic growth could be accelerated and social tensions eased in the regions. This challenge is aggravated by the absence of reliable institutions (understood as enforceable rules of the game) regulating centre-periphery relations and the ideological and organisational disarray at the centre itself. In the regions along Russia's post-Soviet borders in particular, this problem is further complicated by a tension between geopolitical insecurity and powerful incentives for trade and economic development coming from outside Russia's borders. Relations between Moscow and the outlying regions thus become a truly 'intermestic' issue, affecting both Russia's internal post-Soviet institution building and the mode of Russia's integration into the global economy. The politics that shape relations between the Russian regions and Moscow are therefore part and parcel of Russia's evolving relations with the outside world, and the policies of regional elites are part and parcel of an increasingly complex fabric of Russia's foreign relations.     

Bring Back the State

As the global financial crisis emanating from the United States shuts down world markets, can globalization survive? Will the resurgent intrusion of the state—and thus politics—into the market lead to protectionism and collapse, as was the case in the early 20th century? Or will the new interconnectivity of climate change and mutual economic dependence—especially between China and the US—deepen global links? The former mayor of Shanghai, legendary Nobel economist Paul Samuelson and Third Way guru Anthony Giddens ponder those questions in this section.     

Further Reinforcement of the Procedural Guarantees of the Right of Soviet Citizens to Turn to the Courts for Judicial Protection

The Principles of Civil Procedure of the USSR and the Union Republics provide that every party concerned has the right, under procedure established by law, to go to court for protection of a violated or challenged right or of an interest protected by law (Art. 5). Because of the particular importance of this right, the same article of the Principles provides that refusal to grant the right of recourse to a court is invalid.