Thanks to our students at Wayne State, Duke, Michigan, and Sydney law schools for their contributions to the revision of this book. Thanks to Deans Robert Ackerman and Jocelyn Benson and Wayne State University Law School and to Virginia Thomas, Director of the Wayne Law Library, and her staff, particularly Michael Samson, for the support that made this revision possible. Thanks to Richard Ainsworth and the two anonymous readers who made helpful suggestions on how we could improve this edition of the book. Thanks to Yimin Kou for discussions of the material in Chapter 14. Thanks to Zainab Sabbagh Hazimi for her helpful research assistance. Thanks to Olive Hyman for her assistance with various aspects of the manuscript. Thanks to John Berger, our editor at Cambridge University Press, and our project manager, Nishanthini Vetrivel, for their help in the process of converting our manuscript to final text.

The cutoff date for this book generally was December 31, 2013, although we have included some material published after that date. In particular, we included some European VAT Directives and Court of Justice cases. 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.