The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recently released the following working papers on the topics of tax, fossil fuel subsidies, fiscal policy and household debt in Australia.
By Feng Wei and Jean-François Wen. IMF Working Paper No. 19/98.
Presumptive income taxes in the form of a tax on turnover for SMEs are pervasive as a way to reduce the costs of compliance and administration. We analyze a model where entrepreneurs allocate labor to the formal and informal sectors. Formal sector income is subjected either to a corporate income tax or a tax on turnover, depending on whether their turnover exceeds a threshold. We characterize the private sector equilibrium for any given configuration of tax policy parameters (corporate income tax rate, turnover tax rate, and threshold). Given private behavior, social welfare is optimized. We interpret the first-order conditions for welfare maximization to identify the key margins and then simulate a calibrated version of the model.
By Santiago Acosta Ormaechea and Atsuyoshi Morozumi. IMF Working Paper No. 19/96.
Does the design of a tax matter for growth? Assembling a novel dataset for 30 OECD countries over the 1970-2016 period, this paper examines whether the value added tax (VAT) may have different effects on long-run growth depending on whether it is raised through the standard rate or through C-efficiency (a measure of the departure of the VAT from a perfectly enforced tax levied at a single rate on all consumption). Our key findings are twofold. First, for a given total tax revenue, a rise in the VAT, financed by a fall in income taxes, promotes growth only when the VAT is raised through C-efficiency. Second, for a given VAT revenue, a rise in Cefficiency, offset by a fall in the standard rate, also promotes growth. The implication is thus that in OECD countries broadening the VAT base through fewer reduced rates and exemptions is more conducive to higher long-run growth than a rise in the standard rate.
By David Coady, Ian Parry, Nghia-Piotr Le and Baoping Shang. IMF Working Paper No. 19/89.
This paper updates estimates of fossil fuel subsidies, defined as fuel consumption times the gap between existing and efficient prices (i.e., prices warranted by supply costs, environmental costs, and revenue considerations), for 191 countries. Globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion (6.3 percent of global GDP) in 2015 and are projected at $5.2 trillion (6.5 percent of GDP) in 2017. The largest subsidizers in 2015 were China ($1.4 trillion), United States ($649 billion), Russia ($551 billion), European Union ($289 billion), and India ($209 billion). About three quarters of global subsidies are due to domestic factors—energy pricing reform thus remains largely in countries’ own national interest—while coal and petroleum together account for 85 percent of global subsidies. Efficient fossil fuel pricing in 2015 would have lowered global carbon emissions by 28 percent and fossil fuel air pollution deaths by 46 percent, and increased government revenue by 3.8 percent of GDP.
By William Gbohoui, W. Raphael Lam and Victor Duarte Lledo. IMF Working Paper No. 19/88.
Growing regional inequality within countries has raised the perception that “some places and people” are left behind. This has prompted a shift toward inward-looking policies and away from pro-growth reforms. This paper presents novel stylized facts on regional inequality for OECD countries. It shows that regional disparity in per-capita GDP is large (even after adjusting for regional price differences), persistent, and widening over time. The paper also finds that rising nationwide income inequality is associated with both rising within-region income inequality and widening average income across regions. The rise in inequality is related to declining incentives for interregional labor mobility, especially for poor households in lagging regions, which are estimated to reduce by as much as one-third in the United States. Against these facts, the paper proposes a framework to identify whether, how and by whom fiscal policies can be used to tackle regional inequality. It outlines conditions under which those policies should be spatially-targeted and illustrates how they can be complementary to conventional means-testing methods in mitigating income inequality.
By Serhan Cevik and Fedor Miryugin. IMF Working Paper No. 19/78.
This paper investigates the impact of taxation on firm survival, using hazard models and a large-scale panel dataset on over 4 million nonfinancial firms from 21 countries over the period 1995–2015. We find ample evidence that a lower level of effective marginal tax rate improves firms’ survival chances. This result is not only statistically but also economically important and remains robust when we partition the sample into country subgroups. The effect of taxation on firms’ survival probability is found to exhibit a non-linear pattern and be stronger in developing countries than advanced economies. These findings have important policy implications for the design of corporate tax systems. The challenge is not simply reducing the statutory tax rate, but to level the playing field for all firms by rationalizing differentiated tax treatments across sectors, asset types and sources of financing.
On Australia
By Elena Loukoianova, Yu Ching Wong and Ioana Hussiada. IMF Working Paper No. 19/76.
This paper discusses the evolution of the household debt in Australia and finds that while higher-income and higher-wealth households tend to have higher debt, lower-income households may become more vulnerable to rising debt service over time. Then, the paper analyzes the impact of a monetary policy shock on households’ current consumption and durable expenditures depending on the level of household debt. The results corroborate other work that households’ response to monetary policy shocks depends on their debt and income levels. In particular, households with higher debt tend to reduce their current consumption and durable expenditures more than other households in response to a contractionary monetary policy shocks. However, households with low debt may not respond to monetary policy shocks, as they hold more interest-earning assets.
(Source: IMF Working Papers)
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