Economics
Cash-Strapped Governments See Revenue in $26 Trillion Online Industry
- Virus provides new incentives to impose digital service taxes
- New taxes will hit e-commerce providers, risk Trump trade wars
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When Indonesia looked for new ways to fund government spending on coronavirus relief last month, the world’s fourth most-populous nation homed in on a driver of the economy that was still healthy: the internet.
“We decided to tax digital companies with an electronic transaction tax because their sales have soared amid the Covid-19 outbreak,” Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said at a press conference. Citing services like Zoom and Netflix, she said “their economic activities are huge.”