The economic consequences of corporate tax rates reductions in the EU: Evidence using a computable general equilibrium model

In a globalised world, governments are eager to attract foreign investors by lowering corporate tax rates. Recent trends point towards a revival of a race to the bottom in corporate income tax (CIT) rates in developed economies. EU countries have been active in this respect. A generalised fall in CIT rate could prove detrimental to tax revenues and trigger increase in other taxes to meet fiscal policy objectives. However, it could also spur investment and growth and prove to be a good fiscal policy strategy if, as a result, the corporate tax base increases. The final economic and fiscal impact of a reduction in CIT rates is therefore unclear. Using a CGE model, we find that uncoordinated tax reforms significantly impact national economies and third‐country effects can be significant when large countries implement CIT rate cuts. Small countries are better off unilaterally reducing their CIT rate at the expense of other EU countries. We find that negative spillovers are mitigated when the country reducing its CIT rate restores its budget balance by cutting either public expenditures or social transfers. A larger degree of non‐EU capital mobility also tends to reduce the negative spillover effects of unilateral CIT rate reductions.     

Preference Erosion,Government Revenues and Non‐tariff Trade Barriers

Developing countries benefiting from developed country unilateral trade preferences fear that Doha Round tariff cuts will erode the value of those preferences. That these programmes confer significant benefits, however, is not clear. Studies indicate that the impact of preference erosion would be minimal for most developing countries. But for a small subset of middle‐income and least‐developed countries, concern may be warranted. WTO members, should address affected countries’ concerns, perhaps by tailoring WTO tariff negotiations to lessen adjustment pressures and providing development assistance. Developing countries also are anxious that lower tariffs will reduce government revenues. Dependence on tariff revenue is diminishing and trade liberalisation need not result in lower total tax revenues or even lower customs revenues. Much depends on a country's current tariff and trade regime, its tax structure and its overall economic structure. At some point, a country does need to broaden its tax base and look to other revenue sources to offset declining tariff revenues. Tax reform, therefore, complements trade reform. A third area of developing country concern is non‐tariff barriers (NTBs), which may limit market access even after tariffs are reduced. Despite prior WTO work in this area, NTBs remain a thorny issue for all WTO members.     

房产税改革对城市房价的影响 ——以上海市为例

从2003年以来,中国许多城市的房价一直在快速上涨。近几年,中央与地方采取了一系列房价调控政策,以控制我国房价直线上涨的情况。2011年1月,房产税试点改革政策首次在上海市和重庆市颁布,在试点城市采取调整税收的方式控制房价。基于2011—2017年上海市住宅商品房平均售价与地方财政房产税的数据,设定线性回归模型,使用普通最小二乘法(OLS)估计征收房产税对城市房价的影响,提出了应扩大房产税征收范围、设置科学的房产税税率、加快政府保障性住房建设、建立健全购房机制等政策建议。     

高房价的成因与房产税改革构想

近年来我国房价大幅度上涨,居高不下的房价不仅给百姓生活带来的巨大压力,也给国民经济健康发展造成了极大的困扰,因此政府部门应对房价进行有效干预。房产税具有取得财政收入、调节房产收益、影响经济运行的功能,但现行房产税制却违背了税收量能负担原则、削弱了税收调节分配功能,应借鉴房产税改革试点城市的经验,加快房产税制改革的步伐,以促进房产市场价格回归理性,更好地保障房地产市场持续、健康有序发展。     

房地产税收、公共服务供给与房价——基于省际面板数据的实证分析

利用中国大陆1998—2009年的省际面板数据研究地方房地产税负、公共服务供给与房价间的关系,结果表明:在整体层面,房地产持有税、交易税与房价显著负相关,而公共支出强度与公共服务水平则与房价显著正相关,并且公共服务正资本化效果大于房地产税负的负资本化效果,人均收入水平与人口密度同样与房价正相关;在区域层面,东部地区房地产税负对房价的影响较大,而在中西部地区,人均收入水平与人口密度则是影响房价的最重要因素。     

Commodity tax harmonization and the location of industry

We study the positive implications of commodity taxation and tax harmonization under the destination and origin principles when firms are monopolistic competitors facing variable demand elasticity and segmented markets. Our emphasis is on the international location of firms in the presence of market size asymmetries and trade costs. Under the destination principle, an increase in the tax rate of a country always causes some firms to relocate to the other. This effect may be reversed under the origin principle when economic integration is deep enough. Under tax harmonization the choice of a common tax principle is irrelevant for the market outcomes and for the global tax revenues. It affects, however, the distribution of revenues between small and large countries.     

The economics of taxes with equivalent effects to tariffs

Developing countries are faced with the issue of tariff replacement at an early stage of their development, due to their increased commitments through Free Trade Arrangements with developed countries. As tariff replacement through VAT, or more sophisticated tools such as income tax, is neither practically nor economically desirable in these economies, this paper investigates the effects of an alternative replacement tax that only affects categories of goods not produced locally. This tax, denominated tax with equivalent effects to tariffs (TEET), is indeed a consumption tax as it concerns all goods, whether imported or potentially produced in the country. Based on a simple diagrammatic approach, the study shows that this tool tends to generate more welfare than tariffs if final prices of goods are left unchanged. It shows that a government can continue to maintain its revenues and increase the welfare of consumers through this fiscal replacement. Additionally, the political and economic reserves associated with this tool are discussed. The TEET are therefore useful mainly for small and non-diversified economies. It also remains that the use of this tool is, in practice, conditioned by the level of tolerance of developed countries, which tend to prohibit it in bilateral agreements with developing countries.     

Foreign Exchange Reserves and Import Demand: Evidence from Latin America

This paper investigates the impact of foreign reserves, domestic real income and relative import prices on import demand for seven Latin American countries. We differentiate empirically between the short‐run and long‐run impact of reserves, income and prices on imports. The paper has three main results. First, we show that there exists a unique long‐run relationship among real imports, real income, relative import prices and real foreign exchange reserves for all seven countries. Second, we find that increases in foreign exchange reserves exert a significant positive effect on import demand in both the long run and the short run in all countries. However, the economic impact of foreign exchange reserves is rather small. Finally, we find that the long‐ and short‐run impact of real domestic income on import demand is positive as well, while the effect of relative prices is negative.     

城市房价、住房产权与主观幸福感

本文利用大型微观数据库CGSS2006,首次对城市住房价格、住房产权和城市居民主观幸福感之间的关系进行实证分析。研究发现:(1)城市房价上涨程度对居民幸福感具有显著的负面影响,房价上涨越快,民众主观幸福感越低;(2)住房产权状况和幸福感显著相关,仅有一套房产者和多房者幸福感显著高于租房者,多房者幸福感显著高于仅有一套房产者;(3)房价上涨对租房者幸福感具有显著负效应,对多房者和仅有一套房产者的幸福感带来显著正向效应,且对多房者幸福感的正向效应显著高于仅有一套房产者;(4)住房质量显著影响居民主观幸福感。这些发现具有重要的现实政策意义。     

初级产品出口关税的作用探析

长期以来,相对于其他商品而言,初级产品出口价格的不断下降给许多仍靠少数出口产品获取外贸收入的发展中国家带来了一系列的挑战,使其成为国际贸易中长期存在且备受关注的焦点之一。因此,许多发展中国家便采取课征初级产品出口税的政策以图解决其所面临的问题。本文在分析初级产品出口关税对出口国及其贸易伙伴的影响基础上,着重论述了采取出口税政策解决出口价格波动带来挑战的利弊,并在最后以一些实证研究的实例说明了这一政策实施效果的不确定性。     

物业税的“实转”探讨及其相关政策选择

十六届三中全会提出“条件具备时对不动产开征统一规范的物业税,相应取消有关收费”。但物业税的开征道路中充满荆棘,种种因素导致我国物业税至今未开征,一直处在“空转”阶段。本文就物业税的开征中遇到的难题展开探讨并提出相应的政策选择和制度设计。     

房产税影响居民住房消费选择吗?——基于美国调查数据的实证研究

通过建立Heckman模型,采用2002年、2004年和2007年美国都市住房调查数据进行实证分析,考察房产税对美国家庭住宅消费选择的影响。结果表明:在住宅权属选择方面,房产税具有负的影响效应;社会经济地位较高的家庭,更倾向于拥有住宅;随着单位面积上房产税税额的提高,具有较低社会经济地位的家庭,其住宅权属需求受到房产税的冲击更小。在住宅消费需求方面,房产税的影响效应显著为负,且对美国不同类型的家庭住宅消费需求的影响效应存在显著的收入水平差异:社会经济地位较高的家庭有更高的住宅消费偏好,随着单位面积上房产税税额的提高,其住宅消费需求受到的影响相对较小。     

Housing wealth effect in emerging economies

In this paper I estimate the impact of changes in real and financial wealth on private consumption for a panel of 17 emerging economies from Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. Households' consumption, income and the two measures of real and financial wealth – proxied by house and stock market prices – are found to be difference-stationary and co-integrated; by means of recent econometric techniques for heterogeneous panels, i.e. the pooled mean group estimator, inference is drawn about the long- and short-run relationships between the variables of interest. The main result of the analysis shows that both real and financial wealth positively affect households' consumption in the long-run, with the elasticity of housing wealth being larger than that of stock market wealth. Moreover, there is also a significant short-run adjustment from income, stock prices and house prices on consumption, i.e. consumption adjusts to its long-run relationship with lags. When the model is run for the two groups of countries separately, the long-run impact of an increase (decrease) in house prices is generally higher in Central and Eastern European economies with respect to Asian ones, which make them more vulnerable to further adverse housing market developments.     

Tax Competition and Tax Revenues

It is often feared that tax competition might lead to a “race to the bottom” and that the consequence of a reduction in tax rates on capital income would be shrinking capital income tax revenues and difficulties for national governments to perform their usual tasks. The following paper analyses what happened to tax revenues in a number of OECD countries. It turns out that taxes on capital income contribute to the financing of public expenditure to a more or less unchanged extent; nor are there significant changes in the level and structure of total tax revenues.      

对我国税负问题的思考

本文对我国税负轻重问题发表了看法,认为在与国外比较税负时,不应把非税收入和国有土地使用权出让收入计入在内。目前,我国宏观税率较低,老百姓感觉税负重,主要原因是我国的税负结构不合理,而且税款的使用也有不尽如人意之处。未来结构性减税,就是要在税收总规模适度增加的基础上调整税负结构,通过税制改革减轻中低收入者的税负。     

Estimating the revenue costs of tax treaties in developing countries

(12764) Petr Janský Marek Šedivý Tax treaties between countries influence how much tax revenues governments receive from multinational enterprises. These treaties often reduce the withholding tax rates on outgoing dividend and interest payments. We provide illustrative estimates of costs for these two taxes for 14 developing countries in sub‐Saharan Africa and Asia in a first multi‐country comparison of this kind. These might be overestimates because we assume that foreign direct investments are not influenced by the tax treaties. We estimate that the highest potential tax revenue losses are within hundreds of millions US$ and around 0.1% of GDP, with Philippines incurring the highest losses both in US$ and relative to GDP. We also find that around 95% of the losses is due to dividends and that only four investor countries—Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland and Singapore—are together responsible for more than half of the losses. We discuss the limitations of these estimates and how future research could improve their quality as well as coverage.     

Cross-border pollution,public pollution abatement and capital tax competition

We analyze the case where governments have to use income tax revenue to finance public pollution abatement and relate the results to the existing literature on capital tax competition. We show that the impact of public pollution abatement on Nash taxes on mobile factor income is non-trivial and the standard results from the tax competition literature can be reversed. When the two countries are identical, the Nash equilibrium capital income taxes converge to the tax on immobile factors income as the degree of cross-border pollution converges to one. When countries are asymmetric and pollution is local the presence of public pollution abatement lowers the capital tax for the capital exporting country, while the impact on the capital tax of the capital importing country is ambiguous.     

Weather as a Competitive Factor between Local and Foreign Manufacturing Companies in Russia

Globalisation has sparked academic interest in companies’ competitive factors and a myriad of internal and external competitive factors have been studied. However, to our knowledge the weather of the host country has not been under study even though weather has been demonstrated to affect economic activity. This paper utilises a company-level panel data to analyse if weather has an impact on domestic and foreign manufacturing companies’ operations in Russia. Temperature was identified to have a non-linear effect on foreign companies’ revenues, such that a warmer year raises revenues in colder regions while balancing out in warmer regions and actually has a negative effect in the hottest regions. For local Russian companies, we discovered an opposite, but less robust effect. This and home country climate based analysis support the hypothesis that foreign companies benefit from more pleasant weather in the local colder climate while the impact is not so critical for the local companies or foreign companies from countries with similar climate to Russia.     

The determinants of tax haven FDI

This paper examines the determinants of a multinational enterprise's (MNEs) decision to set up tax haven subsidiaries. We adapt the firm-specific advantage–country-specific advantage (FSA–CSA) framework and construct a number of empirically testable hypotheses. The analysis is based on a database covering 14,209 MNEs in twelve OECD countries. We find that the variety of capitalism of a MNEs home location and the level of technological intensity has a strong impact on this decision. We also find that the home country corporate tax rate has a minimal impact. This suggests that corporate tax liberalisation is unlikely to deter MNEs from undertaking this activity.     

Exchange Rate Volatility and Exports: New Empirical Evidence from the Emerging East Asian Economies

This paper examines the impact of bilateral real exchange rate volatility on real exports of five emerging East Asian countries among themselves as well as to 13 industrialised countries. We recognise the specificity of the exports between the emerging East Asian and industrialised countries and employ a generalised gravity model. In the empirical analysis we use a panel comprising 25 years of quarterly data and perform unit‐root and cointegration tests to verify the long‐run relationship among the variables. The results provide strong evidence that exchange rate volatility has a negative impact on the exports of emerging East Asian countries. In addition, the results suggest that the pattern of bilateral exports is influenced by third‐country variables. An increase in the price competitiveness of other emerging East Asian countries has a negative impact on a country’s exports to a destination market, but the magnitude of the impact is relatively small. These results are robust across different estimation techniques and do not depend on the variable chosen to proxy exchange rate uncertainty. The results of the GMM‐IV estimation also confirm the negative impact of exchange rate volatility on exports and suggest that this negative relationship is not driven by simultaneous causality bias.