Thanks to our students at Wayne State, Harvard, and Michigan law schools for their contributions to the revision of this book. Thanks to Dean Frank Wu and Wayne State University Law School, and to Georgia Clark, Director of the Wayne Law Library, and her staff for the support that made this revision possible. Thanks to our colleague Richard Ainsworth and the two anonymous readers who made helpful suggestions on how we could improve our first attempt at comparative value added tax. Thanks to Karen Kissinger for her very helpful research assistance. Thanks to our faculty assistants, Olive Hyman and Lise Berg, for their assistance with various aspects of the manuscript. Thanks to John Berger, our editor at Cambridge University Press, and Peggy Rote, Laura Lawrie, and Dianne Scent for their help in the process of converting our manuscript to final text.

The cutoff date for this book generally was March 31, 2006, although we have included some material published after that date. In particular, we included some European Court of Justice cases, including those covering the Italian subnational tax (IRAP) and some VAT-abusive transactions. This book is not intended to be exhaustive. It therefore does not include all significant cases in all countries or even all English-speaking countries. It is designed to illustrate, analyze, and explain the principal theoretical and operating features of value added taxes, including their adoption and implementation.