Study on Council Directive 2011/64/EU on the structure and rates of excise duty applied to manufactured tobacco
Study on Council Directive 2011/64/EU on the structure and rates of excise duty applied to manufactured tobacco
09/2016-03/2017
Purpose:
The main purpose of this study is to feed the necessary information into the Impact Assessment, allowing legislators taking an informed decision. As Directive 2011/64/EU was included in the REFIT programme, the overall objective of the Impact Assessment is to identify possibilities for simplification and reduction of administrative burdens and costs while achieving a higher degree of compliance. Within that scope the purpose of the study is to help the Commission services in assessing if and why they should act and how these objectives could and should be achieved. The Commission also needs to verify whether the best option is a legislative proposal at EU level and to which extent a solution could be achieved by administrative cooperation or other non-legislative measures.
Against this background the study should:
1. gather and analyse the evidence on the existing costs and benefits arising from the Directive, with the main focus on analysing the scale of the problems identified in the evaluation study referred to above;
2. assess the evolution of the problems if no further action at EU level is taken (dynamic baseline scenario);
3. assess the economic, social and environmental impacts of the possible options to address the problems identified.
Additionally, the analysis will include quantification of the main impacts.
Scope:
All products currently covered by Directive 2011/64/EU as well other products such as raw tobacco, new tobacco products such as ‘heat-not-burn’ tobacco products and electronic cigarettes which are currently not covered (explicitly) by the Directive, will be considered within the scope of the study.
As the Directive is in force throughout the EU, the study will cover all 28 Member States. The quantitative analysis of the compliance costs for Member States and economic operators will be based on the case studies to be conducted in some of the Member States. As tobacco taxation is not fully harmonized, differences at Member State level in regard to the implementation of issues such as the optional Minimum Excise Duty (MED), tax structures, rates, exemptions and additional measures on national level for enforcement purposes, are likely to have occurred. This will, in particular, be the case for products that are currently not covered by Directive 2011/64/EU, because some Member States have developed national legislation for these products, including on tax structures. As a result, the study will captures these differences and assesses their impact on the functioning of the internal market.
Sponsor: Directorate General Taxation and Customs Union (DG TAXUD)
Consortium & project leader: Economisti Associati srl
Project partners: Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), EUROPE Ltd, wedoIT – solutions GmbH, ECOPA
Experts: Grzegorz Poniatowski
Project Manager: Karolina Zubel
