地方政府竞争与对策——基于Justmon-Thisse模型及其扩展的分析

政府竞争是政府运用税收、补贴、基础设施等手段吸引可流动的人力、投资等资源,目的在于促进本地经济的增长,迎合本地居民需要。但是在晋升博弈背景下的政府竞争则由于由官员的收益代替了居民的收益作为地区收益的代表,因此出现了地区基础设施同质化和以高额补助方式进行恶性竞争的招商引资大战。通过对贾斯特曼－蒂斯模型的拓展,我们论证了进行政治体制改革是解决我国政府间恶性竞争的关键,成立具有约束力的区域协调机构或区域合并能够提高本区域的收益水平,通过促进人口自由流动等方式建立“用脚投票”机制,可以作为对政治体制改革滞后的一种有益弥补。     

The Complexity of Tax Structure in Competitive Political Systems

We explore the nature of tax complexity in competitive political systems. The analysis does not rely upon imperfections in the operation of the public sector. Complexity arises in the course of the struggle for office, during which political parties are induced to propose platforms that discriminate carefully among heterogeneous voters. A basic model is enriched by the addition of administration costs and self-selection, factors which limit the ability of any government to discriminate fully. The effect on complexity of inequalities in political influence is also investigated. The analysis suggests that simple tax systems (such as a flat tax or a broadly based tax without special provisions) are not compatible with vigorous political competition.     

Interjurisdictional Tax Competition in a Federal System of Overlapping Revenue Maximizing Governments

Academic literature in public finance has focused on interjurisdictional tax competition—namely among similar types of local governments—but has leaved vertical externalities arising from interactions between two overlapping governments sharing the same tax base aside. The purpose of this paper is to provide a simple model within which interjurisdictional tax competition and vertical interactions between two overlapping governments that share the same tax base can be analyzed simultaneously. We find that interjurisdictional tax competition reduces the global tax rate set by both overlapping governments (federal and local) but is unable to solve completely the distortion arising from vertical externalities. The model is also extended to allow for government subsidies to industrial capital. We give sufficient conditions for capital subsidies to be more efficient to attract capital when they are granted at a federal level rather than at a local level.     

Institutional quality and capital taxation

We describe the preferred taxation regime in a small economy with uncertain institutional quality. We obtain that a preferential taxation regime in which taxes can be matched to the mobility of the tax base may be worse off than a non-preferential taxation regime in which taxes are constant across bases with distinct mobility. Since the small economy takes foreign taxes as given, our result is not driven by a downward pressure on revenues caused by unconstrained tax competition. It is instead related to the ability of a non-preferential taxation regime to credibly convey information about the institutional quality of the small economy. We present some empirical evidence which corroborates our results.     

Asymmetric tax competition in the presence of lobbying

This paper incorporates the influence of interest groups into the asymmetric tax competition model to explain the phenomenon that small countries do not necessarily set lower capital tax rates than large countries. In addition to the efficiency effect considered by the standard model, which leads the smaller country to set a lower capital tax rate, this present paper also takes account of the political effect arising from lobbying. We show that the smaller country may face less downward political pressure. If the political effect outweighs the efficiency effect, then the smaller country sets a higher tax rate than the larger country. This result has several welfare implications, which are in contrast to the conventional consequences.     

经济增长、税收收入与宏观税负——基于中国宏观经济数据的实证研究

本研究以经济增长、税收收入与宏观税负三者间的关系为研究对象,利用中国2006年第1季度至2011年第3季度的税收收入、GDP和所计算得出的小口径宏观税负的数据,以供给学派经济学家亚瑟.拉弗（Arthur Laffer）提出的著名的＂拉弗曲线＂（Laffer-curve）为指导,建立计量经济模型,分别测算实现经济增长最大化的宏观税负和实现政府税收收入最大化的宏观税负,并分析了中国税收收入与经济增长的关系,为近年来中国积极推进财税体制改革和近期出台的结构性减税政策提供支持。     

地方竞争是否阻碍了地方政府债务绩效的提升？——理论框架及空间计量研究

本文从举债行为策略视角考察地方竞争对地方政府债务绩效的影响。 首先,从不同地区间举债行为策略互动的视角对地方竞争如何影响地方政府债务绩效进行理论诠释,其次,在采用Global超效率DEA方法测度地方政府债务绩效的基础上,突破空间独立性假设,运用空间杜宾模型对地方竞争影响地方政府债务绩效的效果及空间外溢性进行实证检验。研究发现,在地方效用最大化目标导向下,无论是地方税收竞争还是公共投资竞争,都对债务增速产生了较为显著的正向影响和空间外溢效应,导致地方采取主动扩大债务规模的举债行为策略。与此同时,随着债务规模的持续增长,无论是地方税收竞争还是公共投资竞争,都将对债务绩效产生“规模报酬递减”的负向影响和空间外溢效应,尤其是公共投资竞争的影响效果更加明显。进一步地,如果考虑到可能存在预算软约束现象,地方竞争还将与预算软约束行为相结合,对债务绩效产生了“使用效率递减”的负向影响。本文结论为通过债务合理使用来促进经济高质量发展,防范化解地方政府债务风险提供了政策启示。     

Taxing commercial motor fuel in the European Union: the case for an apportionment-based, destination-principle system

Motor fuel is taxed by European Union member states where purchased. This article describes (a) the case for destination-based taxation of motor fuels, (b) economic distortions, incentives for destructive tax competition, and questionable division of tax base inherent in purchase-based taxation of commercial motor fuel, (c) loss of fiscal sovereignty inherent in minimum tax rates, imposed to alleviate the first two problems, and in uniform rates, (d) the apportionment-based system employed in the US and Canada and its advantages, (e) technology to determine distance traveled in each member state, and (f) legal and political obstacles to adopting an apportionment-based system.      

How to arrest the decline of local government

In political terms, the case for abolishing rates and substituting a local income tax has frequently been made, notably by the Layfield Committee of Inquiry into Local Government Finance: political independence of local government can only come through financial independence from central government grant. The financial case, which has so far tended to go by default, is based on the premise that local spending decisions can only be made responsibly if the cost of these decisions is felt on the authorities’ own tax base. With the existing level of government support, that is impossible ‐ at least with a Government which appears reluctant to follow through the logic of its new block grant and make rates take the strain of extra spending. Historically, local government has lost its powers in direct proportion to the decline in its tax base. Only local income tax will allow expansion of local responsibility in the longer term, and provide the basis for proper financial accountability. That should appeal to a Government which has often professed its support for such an expansion, and yet is also concerned with making sure that taxing and spending decisions are taken together.     

经济差距、产业集聚与税收竞争——基于区域差异的角度

随着地区分工的日益专业化,产业集聚对地区经济增长的作用日益重要。产业集聚对税收竞争的影响可能存在区域差异效应。利用我国1997～2007年相关数据进行实证检验,结果表明:产业集聚对税收竞争的影响在不同地区存在差异;其中产业集聚对东部地区税费负担产生了显著的正向影响,对中、西部地区税费负担则产生了负向影响,但作用不显著。对产业集聚产生的集聚租则需加以引导,借以提升社会总福利水平。     

Do government preferences matter for tax competition?

This paper explores how government preferences affect capital tax decisions of a country. We develop a model in which governments, differentiating in their preferences for economic development and income equality, compete for mobile capital over corporation taxes. The key prediction of the model, borne out in data from OECD countries over the years 1990–2012, is that an increase in government preferences for pursuing economic development relative to income equality makes countries’ horizontal tax reactions stronger. Unlike the existing studies, our result contributes to the tax competition literature by highlighting the importance of government preferences in determining the extent of tax competition among countries and so offering a novel explanation for the widely observed heterogeneous tax policies across countries.     

中国金融税制研究(上)

税收对于促进金融业发展的作用是相当重要的.随着经济、政治形势的发展和竞争环境的改变,中国金融业遇到了前所未有的激烈竞争.中国金融税制存在的问题,尤其是同国际上通行的税制不接轨的矛盾日益突出,适时改革金融税制,对于促进中国金融行业的发展乃至整个经济的发展都至关重要.因此,中国金融税制需要改革.本文分析了中国现行金融税制存在的主要问题,并对中国金融税制的改革方向进行初步探讨.     

Explaining Underutilization of Tax Depreciation Deductions: Empirical Evidence from Norway

Many corporations do not claim all of their allowable tax depreciation deductions. Intuitively, this kind of behavior might seem odd. However we propose several possible explanations. First, we find strong evidence that firms facing current tax losses or carrying forward past losses underutilize depreciation in order to recover tax losses before they expire. Second, corporations with bad economic performance tend to underutilize their deductions, suggesting that corporations use costly windowdressing on their accounting measures. Third, we find support for the hypothesis that tax compliance costs discourage the utilization of accelerated depreciation, especially by small firms. We do not find much support for other hypotheses. For example, we find no evidence of substitution between tax depreciation and private debt due to competition between the benefits of private bank monitoring and the tax savings from using tax allowances to postpone tax payments, as suggested in earlier literature. We also study the effects of the uniform reporting accounting system (typical of many European countries) which can, under certain circumstances, constrain dividends. Forgoing some tax depreciation can loosen the dividend constraint, but the evidence does not support this motivation. Unusual access to extremely detailed individual firm tax return forms in Norway made our empirical analysis possible. In addition, the 1992 Norwegian tax reform provided a natural experiment for testing some of the hypotheses. We use the time-series and cross-sectional variation across Norwegian corporations in 1988, 1991, 1992 and 1993.     

Federal tax competition and the efficiency consequences for local taxation of revenue equalization

Recent work has shown that a system of equalization grants can neutralize the efficiency loss caused by tax competition among lower-level governments. These models, however, ignore the vertical tax externalities that occur when the federal and lower-level governments levy taxes on the same base. This paper incorporates equalization grants into a standard capital tax competition model in which there are horizontal tax externalities between jurisdictions and vertical tax externalities between the levels of government. It is shown that, even in the presence of vertical tax externalities, an efficient level of lower-level government taxation can be achieved with a modifying version of a standard equalization grant formula.     

Tax competition and fiscal equalization under corporate income taxation

This paper challenges the view that tax base equalization by the so-called representative tax system (RTS) removes inefficient undertaxation in corporate tax competition. The innovation of the paper is that it focuses on a tax on corporate income, instead of the unit tax on capital considered in previous studies. We employ a tax competition model with fiscal equalization and show that the RTS fails to fully internalize pecuniary and fiscal externalities. As a consequence, the RTS yields inefficiently low tax rates in the Nash equilibrium of the tax competition game between governments. Tax revenue equalization performs even worse, but combined with equalization of private income it implements the efficient tax rates on corporate income.     

Profit tax competition and formula apportionment

We analyze corporate income tax competition with international capital mobility when the common tax base is allocated to governments according to an apportionment formula. Labor can be either internationally mobile or immobile. We compare the Nash equilibria for different apportionment methods. Tax competition produces lower tax rates the more elastically the formula share responds to tax rate changes. More specifically, equilibrium tax rates are typically lowest when apportionment is based on property-shares, followed by payroll- and sales-shares apportionment. Compared to their cooperative levels, equilibrium tax rates are too low for property-share apportionment but tend to be too high for the other formulas. JEL Classification H77 · H25 · F23     

Tax Competition and Foreign Capital

This paper derives welfare equivalence of double taxation rules in a tax competition model with discriminatory home taxes and the ability to finance subsidiary operations with host country capital. For a more general model, we provide sufficient conditions on the number of host sectors and factors that support double-tax-rule equivalence. Examples violating these conditions help identify economic factors under which a home country has strict preferences over double taxation rules. If the home tax rate can influence host factor prices, the home country weakly prefers deductions over credits as in the pure-home-equity financing case.     

Capital Mobility and Source-Based Taxation of Capital Income in Small Open Economies

This paper examines the taxation of capital income in a small open economy that faces a highly elastic supply of internationally mobile capital and increasing tax competition. The analysis considers a wide variety of additional factors that affect the determination of capital income taxation policy, including the desire to tax economic rents earned by foreign and domestic firms, the desire to take advantage of any treasury transfer effects, the role played by transfer pricing and other financial accounting manipulations by foreign multinationals, the need for a backstop to the personal income tax and various political concerns. The paper evaluates several potential income and consumption-based tax reforms in this context. JEL Code: H21, H25, H87     

FDI determination and corporate tax competition in a volatile world

This paper investigates the impact of economic and political volatility on corporate tax rates on a large dataset of countries over the 1983–2003 period. Estimation of a dynamic tax rate equation supports the hypothesis that economic volatility negatively affects statutory corporate tax rates, while political volatility has no significant effect. In order to identify the channels through which volatility works, we estimate a structural model allowing for simultaneous determination of corporate tax rates and FDI inflows, and find that economic volatility affects the corporate tax setting process through its impact on FDI inflows.     

On the political economics of tax reforms: survey and empirical assessment

Political constraints and incentives are the true driver of tax reforms. This paper reviews the political economics literature on personal income tax systems and reforms to see how political mechanisms help explain tax reforms. We take some of the implications of these theories to the data using LABREF, a database that identifies labor tax reforms in the European Union for the period 2000–2007, and control for economic and labor market factors. We find that political variables carry more weight than economic variables, and we show empirical regularities that support political economy theories. We also find that governments tended to reform more in better economic times, engaging in pro-cyclical behavior.