税制亲贫性:谁在承担着中国的税负?

The Pro-poorness of Taxation:Who Bears the Tax Burden in China?

识别和度量现行税制下税负在地区间税负分布状况,对理解税收的分配效应以及指导中国税制改革实践都具有重要的现实意义。本文构建了一种识别和测度中国税制"亲贫性"程度的数量方法,并基于1998—2011年中国县市一级经验数据,实证分析了现行税制结构下税负在地区间的承担主体,通过跨期分析捕捉税制调整对区域收入分配格局的影响效应。研究结果表明,绝对规模上平均而言,中国的农业税、营业税以及非税收入更多地由贫困及低收入地区所负担;个人所得税税负在不同收入地区分配大致相当;经济发展水平更好的地区承担了更多增值税、城市维护建设税、企业所得税以及契税税负。在现行税制收入再分配空间日益有限的背景下,规范和减少非税收入以及间接税向直接税主体税制转变等举措,将是进一步发挥税收再分配功能的有效途径。

With the growing of government taxation revenue, it is highly concerned what tax policies should be taken by government to reduce the income disparity in China. But tax system perfectly designing depends on the analysis of actual tax burden takers in the current tax policies. For this purpose, it is important to identify and measure the regional variation of tax burden for understanding the microscopic effects of taxation. So it has great theoretical value and practical significance to study on this topic for understanding the effects of tax distribution and guiding the taxation reform in China. In this paper, we attempt to construct a quantitative method for measuring the pro-poorness index of different taxes in China. Meanwhile, it empirically estimates who is actually in charge of bearing the tax burden based on the counties data from 1998 to 2011, and analyzes what kind of redistribution effects will take place in the periods with adjustment of taxation institution. If with a pro-poorness index greater than 1.0, the burden is more shared by the poor areas and individuals for this kind of tax ; and if with a pro-poorness index less than 1.0, the tax burden is more shared by the developed areas and rich individuals. And it＇ s also an effective way to better the income distri- bution statue by comparing pro-poorness indexes between taxes and changing the structure. And several empirical conclusions are found in this paper. Firstly, the burden of agriculture tax, business tax as well as non-tax revenue, is more shared by poor counties, while the personal income tax is almost equally shared by developing and developed areas. On the other side, the developed areas bear more tax burden of value-added tax, corporate income tax, deed tax, and urban maintenance and construction tax. Secondly, the taxation tends to be much fairer along with the adjustment of the taxation system and the tax reform bonus is more gained by the poor individu- als and low-income counties. Thirdly, it is an effective way to regulate the scale of non-tax revenue as well as to en- hance the tax progressivity for insisting on bringing to bear the tax redistribution function for a better redistribution taxation system. There are several advantages over previous studies. First, as far as we know, the article belongs to the first pa- per for empirically measuring who bears the tax burden based on the data of counties in China. It used to be a diffi- cult task to evaluate the tax burden taker for missing taxation data of households and individuals. Second, we provide a helpful method to identify and measure the effects of tax reforms since 1994 in China. Actually, this method can also be used to evaluate some other reforms that may affect the scale and structure of individuals＇ income. Third, this paper also enriches the research literature in some different fields, such as taxation fairness, income distribu- tion; and we also provide evidence based on the micro data from China. The implication of this paper contains two aspects. On the one hand, the government needs to standardize and reduce the non-tax income or gradually take it into the public finance budget control ,just like the government taxation administration. It will be an effective measure to reduce the individual income gap. On the other hand, the taxation system should be more progressive and then more tax burden will be shared by the richer areas and individuals.