The Later You Pay,the Higher the k

This paper shows the importance of the age path (life-cycle timing) of any tax for the accumulation of capital in the economy. Income, consumption, and wage taxes differ in their age paths as well as their incentive effects. This paper studies how the differing age path of each tax affects the capital accumulation of the economy in an empirically calibrated life-cycle model. We investigate lump-sum “age” taxes and find in every case that the later the person pays tax, the higher the k of the economy. To analyze the life-cycle timing effect of conventional transactions-based taxes (income, consumption, and wage), we replace each tax with a lump-sum age tax that has the identical age path of tax payments over the life cycle. We find that the timing effect is quantitatively important and often causes the impact of a tax on capital accumulation to be very different from what would be predicted from the incentive effect.     

Public Goods,Tax Policies,and Unemployment in LDCs

We build a general equilibrium model of a small open economy characterized by unemployment and producing two privately traded goods and one nontraded public consumption good. The provision of public good is financed with an income tax or an excise tax on the manufactured good or an import tariff. Within this framework, the paper examines the effects of such policies on the country's unemployment ratio and welfare, and it derives the efficiency rules for public good provision for each policy instrument. It shows, among other things, that the private marginal cost of the public good always overstates its social marginal cost in the case of income taxes and may overstate it in the case of an excise tax on the manufactured good or a tariff even if the taxed good and the public good are substitutes in consumption.     

1992-2003年我国流转税与所得税的发展

分析流转税与所得税近十年的发展变化和未来的增长趋势,结合我国税制改革以来流转税和所得税的发展变化的特点,用实证的方法,拟合流转税和昕得税关于国内生产总值的历史发展轨迹,测算流转税和所得税与各项经济指标的相关系数,具体量化当经济增长一定的条件下,所得税优于流转税的倍数;可建立经济计量模型,得到流转税和所得税应该达到的最优税收比例。     

An Efficiency Analysis of Proposed State and Local Sales Tax Reforms

With few exceptions, state and local general sales and use taxes are levied primarily on tangible goods. Secular trends in production and consumption of goods and services, as well as legislated exemptions and exclusions, have eroded sales tax bases. A number of reforms designed to reduce base erosion have been proposed, including base broadening, conversion to a consumption tax, and wholesale replacement of sales taxes with income taxes. Each proposal has potential to shore up sales tax bases. From an economic perspective, the policy choice should turn on efficiency, equity, and simplicity. This paper reports on a computer analysis of efficiency effects. The results suggest that (i) base broadening can increase economic efficiency, (ii) converting to a consumption tax base dominates base broadening, (iii) replacing sales taxes with higher income taxes could produce large efficiency losses, (iv) base broadening could generate efficiency gains even if untaxed remote sales become a “sizable” fraction of total sales, and (v) even partial base broadening could produce sizable efficiency improvements.     

Estimating the Corrective Tax for Goods whose Consumption Affects the Consumer’s Health

Taxing goods whose consumption has an adverse impact on the consumer’s health appears to be gaining support. But the social benefit from taxes on these goods is debatable. This paper considers what the corrective tax on such a good is and applies this theory to one good whose health effects are well established. More specifically, we produce a formula for computing the corrective tax on a good whose consumption may adversely affect the health of the consumer, and then use this formula to calculate the corrective tax for one such good, cigarettes.     

促进循环经济发展的税收政策选择

目前我国经济增长方式依然属于粗放型增长,以牺牲环境、过度消耗资源为代价来发展经济。发展循环经济是我国经济社会发展的一项重大战略,需要通过税收政策的运用和监督管理,调节不同主体的经济利益,促进循环经济发展。现行税制对循环经济的发展还存在种种制约,有必要改进现行税种;开征碳税;对生态工业园区实行倾斜的税收优惠政策。     

Rebalancing in China: A taxation approach

The rebalancing of the Chinese economy is analyzed through a heterogeneous taxation of various types of firms. Based on a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model, the paper applies tax reforms to raise consumption, reduce some firms' overinvestment (overcapacities) and maintain a high level of welfare.To rebalance consumption and investment, taxation may allow reallocating a part of the labor force to firms that are not overinvesting (via business taxes and social security contributions). Moreover, the correction of distortions in production factor costs (capital and labor) is necessary during certain reforms applied in the model; that is, on the one hand, higher credit costs for firms that face soft budget constraints (via financial transactions taxes) and, on the other hand, a catch-up of foreign firms' wages by domestic firms (via social security contributions).These tax reforms bring welfare benefits to households and stabilize the welfare reaction to productivity shocks. Another interesting result is that in this framework, the rebalancing of the domestic demand in China does not require the readjustment of the external financial position. Indeed, the aggregate savings rate remains high and the supply of domestic assets is reduced.Finally, another model proposes a heterogeneous taxation of consumption across home and foreign goods to enhance consumption.     

Uncertainty and Optimally Uniform Commodity Taxes

This paper examines the implications of uncertainty for the structure of optimal commodity taxes in the presence of a linear income tax. Consumers face uncertain income and commit to consumption of some goods before the resolution of uncertainty and to others after. Preferences are separable between labor and consumption goods. We prove that optimal commodity taxes are (i) uniform within the category of noncommitted goods if their subutility is logarithmic; (ii) uniform within the two categories if both subutilities are logarithmic; and (iii) nonzero across categories, with the tax rate on precommitted goods being lower than the tax rate on noncommitted goods.     

Beer Taxation and Alcohol-Related Traffic Fatalities

Most studies of alcohol-related traffic fatalities find beer taxes to be an important policy variable. This is surprising since beer taxes only have a small impact on consumption and heavy drinkers are the least responsive to prices. This study shows that the tax relationship is not robust across data periods and that it reflects missing variable biases. While lack of control for law enforcement effort does not appear to bias tax coefficients, failure to include determinants of alcohol consumption other than taxes and drinking age and/or factors that simultaneously determine drinking behavior and political support for alcohol taxes apparently do.     

Regime-Dependent Fiscal Multipliers in the United States

This paper proposes a regime-dependent model to estimate fiscal multipliers in the US. Output, consumption and investment are assumed to respond to tax and spending changes in a nonlinear manner. Fiscal multipliers are time-varying because their size and sign depend upon the state of the economy (upturns and downturns). Keynesian effects appear essentially during downturns, while anti-Keynesian effects are observed during expansions. Transfer payments contributes to a higher private consumption when they are given to consumers in bad times. Reducing taxes boosts consumption in good times. Investment responds positively to lower taxes during downturns, but negatively in the upturn regime. Our results thus suggest that Keynesian effects have been associated to expansionary policies during recessions, while anti-Keynesian effects were observed during expansions illustrating situations of expansionary fiscal consolidation. The effectiveness of fiscal positive impulses increases in downturns relative to upturns. A corollary is therefore that austerity measures during recessions would have detrimental effects on the GDP and its components.     

The double dividend from carbon regulations in Japan

Using a multisector dynamic CGE model, this paper examines the double dividend from carbon regulations in Japan. The model has 27 sectors and goods (eight goods generate carbon emissions) and covers 100 years (from 1995 to 2095). When carbon regulations are introduced, pre-existing taxes are reduced, keeping government's revenue constant. Our main findings are summarized as follows. First, the weak double dividend arises in all scenarios. This means that by using revenues from carbon tax to finance reductions in pre-existing distortionary taxes, one can achieve cost savings relative to the case where the tax revenues are returned to households in lump-sum fashion. Second, the strong double dividend does not arise from reductions in labor and consumption taxes, but it does from reductions in capital tax. The second result is attributable to the nature of the pre-existing tax system in Japan where capital taxes are more distortionary than labor and consumption taxes. J. Japanese Int. Economies 21 (3) (2007) 336–364.     

Welfare gains from taxation in an open economy: Applied general equilibrium results

This paper uses a general equilibrium trade model with an endogenous labour supply to analyze the effects of changes in domestic taxes. When an open economy has some sectors with scale economies, domestic tax increases may increase social welfare by causing productivity gains which more than compensate for the deadweight welfare loss of taxation.     

广东省税收问题探析

广东省税收地位十分重要,连续14年税收总量全国第一,但是广东省税收存在的问题也是不容忽视的。本文充分利用广东省的税收数据,分析了广东省的税负水平与发达国家相比,远远偏低的;广东省的主体税种“生产型增值税”已经不能适应广东省经济发展的需要;广东省内外资企业所得税标准不统一影响了广东省公平竞争的经济环境。     

新疆地区税收与经济增长之间的实证分析

本文以新疆地区1994年-2009年间税收收入与经济总量GDP的发展现状为例,探讨了税收增长与经济增长的相关性,并提出了通过调整产业结构和税收政策的方式促进经济与税收之间的协调发展。     

Tax Incidence in Vietnam*

This paper examines the incidence of taxation in Vietnam, using data from the Living Standards Survey of 1997–1998 and an input–output matrix for 1997. The tax system in 1998 was slightly progressive, taking the equivalent of 7.8percent of spending for households in the lowest, and 10.3percent from households in the highest expenditure quintile. The replacement of the turnover tax by a value‐added tax in January 1999 made the system marginally more progressive, and the falling importance of taxes on trade has had a negligible effect on the overall incidence of the tax system. The tax system is progressive overall because business income taxes fall mainly on better‐off households; and low‐income households rely heavily on home consumption, which is untaxed. Against this, agricultural taxes and fees are highly regressive. The recent phasing out of the agricultural land use tax is making the tax system more progressive; however, efforts since 2004 to limit price increases for motor fuels have effectively provided a relatively greater subsidy to rich than to poor households.     

税收政策对居民消费的“异质性”效应——基于规模结构双重视角下的实证分析

在全球经济形势愈加严峻及中央实施"双循环"新发展格局的背景下，充分发挥税收政策对居民消费的驱动作用具有重要意义。以往基于常参数计量经济模型的研究忽略了不同经济时期税收政策对居民消费的"异质性"效应。文章采用DAG递归预测的方差分解法，对于税收政策与居民消费间的动态因果关系进行识别，并构建带有随机波动率的时变参数因子扩展向量自回归模型，分别从税收规模和税制结构视角出发，探究税收总量、不同税系、不同税类以及不同税种对居民消费的时变效应。研究发现：（1）不同时期税收政策对居民消费的影响程度差异较大，经济萧条时期税收政策对居民消费的影响并不显著，危机后影响程度大幅提高并长期稳定在较高水平。（2）从税收规模来看，税收政策对居民消费产生极为显著的"非凯恩斯效应"。从税制结构来看，直接税的扩张对居民消费产生显著的促进效应；商品税及其内部消费税、增值税的扩张显著"挤出"消费，关税轻微"挤入"消费，近年来增值税的"挤出效应"大幅增强；个人所得税对消费的"挤入效应"显著强于企业所得税；财产税的总体扩张对消费产生"挤出效应"，但占比相对较高的房产税、契税和土地增值税并未"挤出"消费。因此，政策当局应适度降低商品税税负水平、逐步下调个人所得税税率、完善财产税制。     

结构性减税政策的路径选择

实施有减有增的结构性税制调整,对扩大内需、刺激经济增长起到了支持作用。使用关联规则中数据挖掘方法的实证结果显示,结构性减税政策作用下各主要税种与总税收收入均出现不同程度的相关度变化。这一实证结果不仅证明本次结构性减税鼓励了企业投资,刺激了居民消费,拉动了经济回升,同时也对未来我国税制改革在减负增收方面提供了有益的新思路。     

Intra-industry adjustment and the correction of an externality

Conclusion The purpose of this paper is to apply some of the existing microeconomic theory literature on intra-industry adjustment resulting from factor price changes to the use of corrective taxes on externalities. The optimal tax to correct the effects of an externality is one placed directly on the external damage. Such a tax is sometimes not practically feasible, in which case either the inputs or output of firms in the externality-producing industry must be taxed as a proxy for the external damage.When the tax is placed on the input associated with the externality, the tax will only produce the optimal result if all firms produce an equal external damage which is proportional to the amount of the input which is used. If the amount of the externality produced by different firms is different, then an input tax will not satisfy the marginal conditions for optimality; and in some cases, the external damage may actually increase as a result of the input tax. An output tax, on the other hand, will never cause the external damage to increase, but will not in general satisfy the marginal conditions for optimality.When the amount of external damage caused by each firm in an industry is difficult to monitor, input or output taxes are two possible policy alternatives for controlling the externality. This paper has demonstrated that there are a number of problems associated with calculating the optimal input or output tax, and that a tax that is correct under restricted assumptions may actually aggravate the problem when examined in a more general environment. This analysis may explain why policy makers favor direct controls to reduce externalities, rather than taking the economist's frequent advice of using corrective taxes to price the externality.We are indebted to Charles Maurice for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

我国税收政策影响初次分配的实证分析

近年来,在我国经济保持持续高速增长的同时,我国居民的收入分配不平等现象也在加剧。税收政策历来都是各国调节收入分配的重要政策杠杆。根据1994～2009年我国的基尼系数、税收收入占GDP比重的时间序列数据,所建立的多元线性回归模型表明,我国现行的以间接税为主体的税制结构,整体上拉大了不同阶层的收入差距。增值税、营业税等税种与基尼系数呈正相关,个人所得税、财产税等直接税也由于征收规模过小、征管存在漏洞等原因,没有充分发挥出直接税应有的收入调节作用。     

Tax rate,government revenue and economic performance: A perspective of Laffer curve

The Laffer curve illustrates a theoretical relationship between rates of taxation and the resulting levels of government revenue. This paper explores the relationship between tax rate (direct tax on labor income), government revenue and economic performance in a perspective of the Laffer curve by applying Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. The results show that the top of China's Laffer curve is about 40%. The government should consider changes in the entire taxation system and not just changes in direct taxes while increasing direct tax rate. If China wants to maximize tax revenues, the direct tax rate should be 35%. We conduct a variety of sensitivity analyses and conclude that the government tax peak is always 5–10% earlier than the apex of the Laffer curve. So, if a country has reached the top of the Laffer curve, this paper strongly recommends that tax cuts will have positive implications for the economy and government revenue.