How Tax Holiday Can Help Your Business

Sales tax holidays are especially common. Typically, they involve suspending the collection of sales tax on a particular day of the year in order to encourage consumers to buy certain items and help local businesses.

For example, many cities have a tax holiday during the back-to-school season in order to encourage people to shop and to help parents pay less for school supplies.

Tax holidays can take many forms, though. Governments sometimes create tax holidays for new businesses. Developing countries might create tax holidays for foreign companies that relocate to the host country. The overarching idea is to lower the cost of doing business in an effort to encourage economic activity.
Why it Matters:

The facts are that internet sales—the majority of which continue to be tax-free—have enjoyed double digit sales growth virtually every year out of the last 15. At the same time, sales at our local stores have been essentially flat after inflation. This is why those who want more taxes to spend have lamented limited sales tax revenue growth. The truth is that the sales tax is virtually 100% avoidable.

Sales tax holidays are supposed to boost business and relieve shoppers, but they are underpublicized, damningly complex and easily manipulated.

Although taxing authorities lose out on tax revenue during a tax holiday, many economists believe that tax holidays actually increase tax revenue over the long term because they help businesses stay in business or grow. Over time, this creates more taxable revenue for the taxing authority and even more tax revenue in the form of payroll and other taxes if those businesses retain or hire employees.

Importance and Benefits of Exports in an Economy

Exports play an important role in economy, influencing the level of economic growth, employment and the balance of payments. If exports increase at a faster pace as compared to imports, nothing can stop an economy from being a developed one. On the other hand, the instability in exports can adversely affects the process of economic development.

Lower exports mean low foreign exchange and lower foreign exchange in turn means a small purchasing capacity of a nation in the international market.

Fluctuations in export earnings introduce uncertainties in an economy. These uncertainties influence economic behavior by adversely affecting the level and efficiency of investment and in turn have a negative effect on growth.

Businesses generally strive to make profits and the bigger the profits the better. In many instances, exports can contribute to increased profits because the average orders from international customers are often larger than they are from domestic buyers, as importers generally order by the container instead of by the pallet (thereby affecting both total sales and total profits). Some products - especially those that are unique or very innovative in nature may also command greater profit margins abroad than in the local market.

 Exports help to put idle production capacity to work. This is generally achieved the more efficient utilisation of the existing factory, machines and staff. What is more, because you are now selling more products without increasing total costs to the same extent, this has the effect of lowering your unit costs which represents a more productive overall operation. Lower unit costs make a product more competitive in the local marketplace as well as in foreign markets, and/or can contribute to the firm's overall profitability.

The concept of trade stability or instability may be based either on a country’s aggregate trade in comparison with the cost of the world or on a binary country pair comparison. Such binary pairs may be large depending upon the number of trading allies.

Export instabilities have been claimed to affect economic growth both positively and negatively. Fluctuation in exports earnings introduces uncertainties in the economy. Supply side policies could include both interventionist supply side policies (such as education and training) and market oriented supply side policies (e.g. reducing the power of trades unions, reducing government regulation). This can enable increased productivity.

Private sector innovation. There is only so much the government can do to promote private sector productivity. Competitiveness depends on new technology and management techniques as much as any government policies

With increased export production and sales, you can achieve economies of scale and spread costs over a larger volume of revenue. You reduce average unit costs and increase overall profitability and competitiveness. Long-term exports may enable a company to expand its production facilities in order to achieve an economic level of production.

How B2B and B2C Sharing eConomy Change Business Style

Sharing economy refers to a common or communal economy that includes the production, consumption and use of commodities. Sharing economy is based on temporary access instead of ownership, by utilizing the development of technology and the popularity of social media, such as sharing platforms. Sharing space, goods and skills is guided by three principles of: 1) efficient use of resources, 2) crowdsourcing, and 3) communality.

Manufacturers, wholesalers and corporate suppliers consistently surprise the market when they enter industries and launch business ventures traditionally dominated by B2C. First, it was the concept of eCommerce, now expected to surpass the value of B2C online retail. Soon after, B2B began taking hold of social media, Big Data, wearable technology and, most recently, the on-demand mobile application market.

Now, experts say B2B is approaching its next frontier: the sharing economy.

At its core, the sharing economy is about a lack of true ownership, allowing goods, services and information to be shared between two or more individuals. It is fundamentally a P2P business model.

Today, however, the corporate advantages of the sharing economy are providing companies with resources that would have otherwise been far less accessible. From sharing data to sharing office space, the sharing economy is expanding as a B2B business model.

B2B sharing economy has grown from almost nothing to a pool of global businesses valued in the billions of dollars. The concept—people using technology to find and purchase one another’s extra resources—represents a triumph of trust and crowdsourcing. Peer-to-peer financial firms such as Lending Club, transportation services such as Uber, and lodging brokerages such as Airbnb have all rapidly taken off, using Internet-based platforms to connect people directly without highly paid intermediaries. It’s no wonder investors are so intrigued, and the rest of us are a little enervated by all the hype.

Sharing economy platforms and applications are already being used widely in the B2C markets, such as Über and Airbnb, but sharing economy solutions for the B2B markets still includes a lot of potential. The principles of sharing economy are being utilized in the B2B markets for instance by sharing machinery in agriculture and forestry. In addition, other tangible assets, such as equipment, raw materials, office space and warehouses can be shared between companies. Intangible shared assets include for instance companies' brainpower, knowledge and intellectual capital.

The potential here is not just to garner ideas from outside inventors through open innovation. Nor is it to open up a platform for third-party developers to introduce ancillary products and software, as computer companies have done for decades. The real potential is for new platforms to evolve that offer a segment of a company’s intellectual property base to the world at large, so that others may do things with it, and the patent holder may profit.

In the current form of this relationship, the two parties collaborate to bring innovations to market. The Chinese appliance company Haier, for example, invites inventors from outside the company to propose innovations they could produce together. But collaboration might not always be necessary. A company with a patent for a new type of battery technology, for instance, might choose not to develop it, but by placing the battery technology on an exchange, the company could make a connection to another company with a complementary technology that would otherwise never have been made.

The sharing economy is built on a simple premise: People who have extra capacity can make money by selling it to other people who need it, without a middleman to siphon off much of the value. Within the past decade, several businesses based on this concept have sprouted up from nothing and turned into billion-dollar enterprises.