Financial-Transaction Tax: Small Is Beautiful

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Financial-Transaction Tax: Small Is Beautiful

Publishing date: 08 February 2010
Authors: Jakob von Weizsäcker Zsolt Darvas

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Based on their contribution to the European Parliament Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, in this Policy Contribution Resident Fellows Zsolt Darvas and Jakob von Weizsäcker discuss the merits of the much-discussed financial-transaction tax. They argue that the case for taxing financial transactions for the sake of not raising revenue is relatively weak, but a financial-transaction tax could be useful in limiting socially-undesirable transactions. On this basis, they say, a very small, coordinated tax on financial transactions could be implemented successfully.

A revised version of this paper was also published in

About the authors

Jakob von Weizsäcker

Jakob von Weizsäcker heads the department for economic policy and tourism at the Thuringian Economics Ministry in Erfurt and is a non-resident fellow at Bruegel where he was resident fellow form 2005 to 2010.

He previously worked at the World Bank in Washington (2002-2005) where he was country economist for Tajikistan and the Federal Economics Ministry in Berlin (2001-2002) where he headed the office of a junior minister. Before that, he worked for Vesta, a venture capital firm, and held research positions at the Center for Economic Studies in Munich and CIRED in Paris.
Zsolt Darvas

Zsolt Darvas is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel and a part-time Senior Research Fellow at the Corvinus University of Budapest. He joined Bruegel in 2008 as a Visiting Fellow, and became a Research Fellow in 2009 and a Senior Fellow in 2013.

From 2005 to 2008, he was the Research Advisor of the Argenta Financial Research Group in Budapest. Before that, he worked at the research unit of the Central Bank of Hungary (1994-2005) where he served as Deputy Head.

Zsolt holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Corvinus University of Budapest where he teaches courses in Econometrics but also at other institutions since 1994. His research interests include macroeconomics, international economics, central banking and time series analysis.