Editorial: From ‘Flatulence Taxes’ to ‘Condom Taxes’: Excises as the New Frontier for EU Tax Law

Traditional excise taxes on products such as sugar or salt, common until the nineteenth century, have been progressively eradicated from domestic tax systems, substituted by more sophisticated tax instruments, such as income and value-added taxes. Yet, now they are back; not (largely) as revenue mobilizers, but as regulatory tools, designed to achieve an ever increasing range of policy aims. The new Chinese ‘condom tax’ and the proposed Danish ‘flatulence tax’ may be novel, but the nature of the developments is not; on the contrary, these measures are part of a wider global trend. Although, this resurgence of excise taxes has significant implications for the design of tax systems worldwide, for the EU they present an additional challenge, namely whether to harmonize or not to harmonize? Until now, EU harmonization of excise taxes has been limited to a small number of traditional commodities: alcohol, tobacco, energy; but as the variety of excise taxes, and the number of Member States applying them, grows, is this position sustainable, not least given the constitutional mandate set out in Article 113 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU)?