个税改革对消费品市场的影响研究——来自2018年个税改革的证据

Research on the Impact of Personal Income Tax Reform on the Consumer Market:Evidence from the 2018 Personal Income Tax Reform

本文检验了个人所得税改革对消费市场的具体影响。研究发现,尽管个税改革提高了居民的零售商品市场价格,但对于服务市场的价格影响非常有限。为了解释这一现象,本文使用分解效应区分耐用和易腐消费品后,发现商品价格的波动大部分来自于耐用消费品,这一现象可以理解为个税改革后,耐用品需求上升,导致商品市场的平均价格上涨;但是,耐用品占居民消费支出的比例却不高,即大部分增量收入用来消费易腐商品和服务。因此,减税后,降低边际税率对商品价格的影响较大,而对服务价格却没有影响。进一步分析发现:减税对消费价格的差异影响主要集中在城市发展水平较低、消费能力较低、服务业发展水平较高、市场准入较高、数字基础设施水平较高和转移支付较高的城市。本文的研究为政府通过税改政策,释放服务消费潜力,进而优化居民消费结构,拉动中国经济增长提供了崭新的经验证据。

In China,personal income tax is one of the important taxes that regulate residents' income levels and income distribution gaps.With the development of China's economy and the increase in residents' income,the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress,the highest organ of state power in China,carried out a series of significant reforms in personal income tax in 2018.This personal income tax reform has raised the threshold for personal income tax exemption from CNY 3,500 per month to CNY 5,000 per month,added six special additional deductions,and adjusted tax rates.According to estimates from the Chinese government,this reform will reduce the number of taxpayers from 187 million to 64 million.The personal income tax reform plays a role in regulating income,promoting residents' consumption and influencing market prices.Specifically,it has reduced the marginal tax rate of taxpayers,increased disposable income and increased residents' consumer demand.According to the current consumption level of Chinese residents,while the supply conditions remain unchanged,the price of goods increases,but the price of services remains basically unchanged.Research has found that after implementing tax reduction policies in developed countries,households will use a small portion of the tax reduction amount to purchase perishable consumer goods,with the majority being used to buy durable consumer goods and services(Kaplan and Violante,2014;Baker et al.,2020).However,whether the personal income tax reform can optimize China's consumption structure still needs further argumentation.This paper uses high-frequency goods and service price data provided by the Price Monitoring Center of the China Development and Reform Commission to study the consumption of Chinese residents from the perspective of micro consumer prices,especially service prices.At present,there are also relatively few studies on the differential impact of exogenous shocks on services and goods(Borchert and Mattoo,2010;Ariu,2016).However,this paper,from the perspective of domestic consumer prices in China,studies how tax reductions can have a differential impact on the prices of goods and services,enriching the research on the differential impact of services and goods.Based on the above analysis,this paper regards personal income tax reform as an exogenous policy impact and applies the difference-in-differences(DID) model with a continuous treatment to estimate its impact on the consumption and service market.The benchmark results indicate that after the personal income tax reform,reducing the marginal tax rate significantly increases the price of goods,but has no impact on the price of services.Meanwhile,the income redistribution effect has a relatively small impact on the prices of goods and services.The decomposition effect indicates that this is mainly due to consumers increasing the proportion of durable goods consumption and reducing the proportion of perishable goods and service goods consumption.This paper examines the heterogeneity of the impact of personal income tax reform on the prices of goods and services in terms of regions and types of consumption.Based on the research findings of this paper,the following policy recommendations are proposed.Firstly,it is necessary to improve the quality of service supply.For cities with relatively backward development levels in the service industry,local governments should optimize the approval process for service enterprises,deepen the opening-up of service departments to the outside world,improve the levels of competition and development in the service industry,and provide high-quality services.Secondly,for small and inland cities,local governments should strengthen the construction of transportation and information infrastructure to promote the inflow of high-quality services from other areas,vigorously develop the digital economy,reduce market search costs,and improve the efficiency of consumer goods matching.Thirdly,there is still room for optimization in the personal income tax reform,such as optimizing tiered tax rates,reducing the burden on low and middle-income groups,and strengthening tax management on wages and salaries of high-income groups.Finally,due to regional differences,a floating mechanism for the personal income tax threshold should be established,to link it to regional price levels and inflation coefficients.