Indirect Taxes Evaluation (Online Lesson)

In this online lesson students develop their knowledge of indirect taxes with key application and evaluation skills. We also cover the incidence of taxes.

WHAT YOU'LL STUDY IN THIS ONLINE LESSON

• The impact of indirect taxes when goods/services have a different PED (applied to the real world)
• The meaning of the incidence of tax (diagrammatically and through calculations)
• How to evaluate the impact of indirect taxes in a range of markets

Additional teacher guidance is provided at the end of this online lesson.

HOW TO USE THIS LESSON

Follow along in order of the activities shown below. Some are interactive game-based activities, designed to test your understanding and evaluation of indirect taxes. Others are based on short videos, that including activities for you to think about and try at home.

If you would like to download a simple PDF worksheet to accompany the video activities, you can download it here: Evaluating Indirect Taxes. You can print it off and annotate it for your own notes, or make your own notes on a separate piece of paper to add to your school/college file.

ACTIVITY 1: VIDEO

This first activity gives you a chance to review the material from the first Indirect Tax Online Lesson.

ACTIVITY 2: VIDEO

In this activity, you will be looking more closely at the impact of indirect taxes on the markets for goods/services with different price elasticities of demand. There's also a chance to apply your knowledge about indirect taxes and elasticities to some real-world markets, including Air Passenger Duty and the Sugar Tax.

ACTIVITY 3: READING AND RESEARCH TASK

In his first 2020 UK Government Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced that he was making tampons and sanitary items "zero-rated" for VAT. This means that there will no longer be indirect taxes on these items. Read about the politics and economics behind this policy change in this 2016 article from The Economist and a review of the Chancellor's announcement in this BBC article from March 7th. Jot down some notes, and carry out your own further reading if you have time.

ACTIVITY 4: VIDEO

In this 3rd video, we'll cover the concept of the incidence of tax on consumers and producers. We'll do this through diagrams, and finish with some calculations to practise those all-important quantitative skills.

ACTIVITY 5: VIDEO

In this video, we'll take you through the meaning of regressive and progressive taxes, and some key evaluation points for indirect taxes.

ACTIVITY 6: GAME

You'll need to focus hard on this Concentration Game! Test your knowledge of the key terms we've covered so far in our online lessons on indirect taxes. There are two alternative games in this activity - make sure to play both of them!

ACTIVITY 7: FINAL VIDEO!

In this activity, you'll be writing an exam-style answer exploring the effectiveness of the sugar tax - you might want to send your completed work to your teacher. We'll then be taking a look at how to evaluate the impact of indirect taxes on a range of markets, making sure to fully consider the context and different stakeholders.

ACTIVITY 8: MULTIPLE CHOICE REVIEW

Here are 10 multiple-choice questions designed to test your understanding of the topics covered in the two online lessons on indirect taxes. Some questions are straightforward, and others are a little bit trickier! Don't forget that you can have another go if you like. How will you fare? You could send your score to your teacher.

ACTIVITY 9: SYNOPTIC EXTENSION TASK

Good economists are able to draw together topics and ideas from across the course. Here is an activity designed to help you do just that! Download this Indirect Tax Synoptic Practice Mat PDF, read the data provided in the centre of the mat, and then work your way around the questions in order, writing your answers on a separate piece of paper. You will need to use some of your macroeconomics knowledge as well. You can check your own answers, using the 2nd page of the document, or ask your teacher for advice.

ADDITIONAL TEACHER GUIDANCE

This online lesson includes:

• 25 minutes in total of guided video
• 20 to 25 minutes (throughout the videos) of "thinking time" and short activities
• An exam-style written task on sugar taxes (in Activity 7) which we expect would take around 20 minutes of writing time, and which you could ask students to submit for assessment
• 2 interactive games - you could ask your students to submit their score to you for Activity 8
• An additional enrichment reading/research task in Activity 3 (approximately 10 to 15 minutes)
• An additional enrichment synoptic task in Activity 9 (approximately 20 to 30 minutes)

If students complete all tasks fully, this is around 2 hours work.