at each stage of production and distribution of goods and services in proportion to the value added by each taxpaying entity. Apart from the role in raising government revenue, indirect taxes, in the form of tariffs and import duties, are also used to regulate quantity of imports and exports flowing in and out of the country. In case of imports, by tariff imposition the government protects domestic producers from foreign producers that may have lower production costs, and thus are able to sell their goods and services at lower prices, driving domestic producers out of the market. After tariff imposition, imported goods become more expensive for domestic consumers, hence domestic producers are better-off than before tariff imposition. Furthermore, indirect taxes in the form of excise taxes are used to reduce the consumption of goods and services that create negative externalities. For instance, an excise tax imposed on a pack of cigarettes increases the price of cigarettes, which leads to decreased consumption of cigarettes, which leads to the reduction of health conditions caused by smoking and second-hand smoking. Moreover, the tax discourages the youth from taking up smoking as they have quite elastic price elasticity of cigarette demand. The concept of Value Added Tax (VAT) as an indirect tax was the brainchild of a German industrialist, Dr. Wilhelm von Siemens in 1918. A hundred years later, the tax which was devised to be efficient and relatively simple to collect and enforce is, together with Goods and Services Tax (GST), now in place in over 140 countries globally. Characteristics of indirect taxes Tax incidence of indirect taxes is not clear, in fact, statutory (legal) incidence in most cases tells us nothing about economic (final) incidence. The incidence of indirect tax imposed on a good or service depends on price elasticity of demand (PED) and price elasticity of supply (PES) of a concerned good or service. In case the good has an elastic demand and inelastic supply, the tax burden falls mainly on the producer of the good, whereas the burden of the good with an inelastic demand and elastic supply falls mainly on consumers. The only case when the burden of indirect tax falls totally on consumers, i.e., statutory and economic incidence are the same, is when the supply of a good is perfectly elastic and its demand is perfectly inelastic, which is, however, a very rare case. The shifting of the