Stian Eikeland bio photo

Stian Eikeland

Developer. Does consultancy work from own company. Lives in Bergen, Norway.

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The Norwegian Customs Tariff

I've been buying a lot of stuff from places like ebay lately. You can generally save money doing this, because of the falling dollar value (1 USD was 5.07 NOK the other day). I generally try to avoid going over the duty-free limit, but it happens on big items from time to time. Most items (electronics at least) only have value added tax (moms), while some have an extra customs tax. All of this is described to the smallest detail in the customs tariff ( toll.no ). I had a look at it the other day and found some weird things.

Turns out that the customs tariff discriminates based on gender. Some examples: Bathrobe for men: 10.7% tax, bathrobe for women: 6.9% tax. Singlet for men: 10.7% tax, singlet for women: 6.9% tax.. the list goes on. What happened to gender equality?

Luckily though, there is no extra tax on nuclear reactors, enriched uranium, armored tanks or spacecrafts (and possibly also combinations of this - armored nuclear powered spacecrafts..) . But I suspect that they cut their losses on this through heavy taxation on dextrin based glue, which has a 495% tax.