1954 marked a milestone in the history when, in Edina,
Minnesota, construction began on the first-ever modern-era shopping
mall. The "Southdale Center", which still exists, was the
first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping centre in the
world, boasting space for 70 shops.
The same year, in France, tax authority director Maurice
Lauré introduced an equally significant invention: Value
Added Tax. VAT is remarkable for two main reasons: firstly, it is
assessed and levied incrementally, based on the increase in value
of a product or service at each stage of its production or
subsequent distribution; and secondly, as an indirect tax, VAT is
not collected by the state directly but through a network of
intermediaries, the taxable persons, who are in charge of
collecting the tax from the consumers (who bear the economic cost
linked with the VAT) and remitting it to the state.
