Evaluating the Revenues from a Financial Transaction Tax in 10 EU Member States through Enhanced Cooperation

This study estimates the potential revenues from introducing a financial transaction tax (FTT) through the enhanced cooperation set-up, as currently discussed between 10 EU countries (FTT10). In the EU the implementation of a financial transaction tax has been discussed for several years now, with the concept being redefined across several important dimensions. Using the methodology of the European Commission, we provide new country-specific estimates with the most recent data regarding the turnover volumes of key financial instruments for the FTT10 countries. We therefore can report both the overall revenue potential of an FTT as well as country-specific potential revenues. Depending on the key parameters (for elasticities, evasion effects and transaction costs) we estimate three different scenarios for the potential revenues from the FTT. We obtain potential revenues between 7.7 and 14.5 billion € for the FTT10 countries and between 158 and 380 million € for Austria. In the middle scenario, the estimated annual potential revenues are 11 billion € for the FTT10 countries and 242 million € for Austria. We also discuss the currently envisioned exemptions for certain types of products and market segments and estimate the revenue shortfall caused by these exemptions.