Potential Fiscal Revenues From Hydrocarbon Extraction for the Tourism Region of the Canary Islands

Hydrocarbon exploration that recently took place in the Canary Islands has triggered a controversy over the compatibility between these activities and tourism. Such exploration was strongly rejected by the region, while being supported by the Spanish government. Many environmental and economic impacts of hydrocarbon extraction were explored, except the fiscal revenues, which represent the main benefit for the producing economies. In this paper, the author addresses this missing piece in the controversy, namely, the assessment of fiscal revenues from hydrocarbons for the Canary Islands. To evaluate these revenues, the author estimates an oilfield production profile, constructs oil and gas price scenarios, and considers the new Spanish tax on hydrocarbons. The estimates are also placed in the socio-economic context of the archipelago. The results show less than overwhelming annual fiscal revenues, below 0.7% of GDP, 10.4% of current public transfers to the region, and 5% of current public spending in 2015. These revenues could be welcome, as the region lags behind the rest of the nation in living standards. However, these benefits from exhaustible resources must be compared to the potential damage to the tourism sector, which has been a long-standing economic driving force for the archipelago.

Tax Reform, Fiscal Revenues, and Farmers＇ Income Evidence from Two Waves of Chinese Agricultural Tax

This paper examines the effect of Chinese agricultural tax reform on local fiscal revenues as well as farmers＇ income. Fixed effects results show that a tax rate reduction from 15.3 to 8.4 % in the first 5 years of the reform did not lead to a corresponding decrease in local fiscal revenues. At the same time, farmers＇ income slightly decreased. In the second 5 years of the reform, the tax rate was reduced to zero. This time, local fiscal revenues decreased linearly with the tax cuts, and farmers＇ income increased by 17.8 %. The link between the actual fiscal revenue reduction and farmers＇ income suggests that merely changing the nominal level of taxation does not necessarily increase farmers＇ income. Rather, the complete implementation of the reform relates crucially to curbing local governments＇ unauthorized extractions.

Application of Grey Model and Neural Network in Financial Revenue Forecast

There are many influencing factors of fiscal revenue,and traditional forecasting methods cannot handle the feature dimensions well,which leads to serious over-fitting of the forecast results and unable to make a good estimate of the true future trend.The grey neural network model fused with Lasso regression is a comprehensive prediction model that combines the grey prediction model and the BP neural network model after dimensionality reduction using Lasso.It can reduce the dimensionality of the original data,make separate predictions for each explanatory variable,and then use neural networks to make multivariate predictions,thereby making up for the shortcomings of traditional methods of insufficient prediction accuracy.In this paper,we took the financial revenue data of China’s Hunan Province from 2005 to 2019 as the object of analysis.Firstly,we used Lasso regression to reduce the dimensionality of the data.Because the grey prediction model has the excellent predictive performance for small data volumes,then we chose the grey prediction model to obtain the predicted values of all explanatory variables in 2020,2021 by using the data of 2005–2019.Finally,considering that fiscal revenue is affected by many factors,we applied the BP neural network,which has a good effect on multiple inputs,to make the final forecast of fiscal revenue.The experimental results show that the combined model has a good effect in financial revenue forecasting.

European Tax Models

The research paper European Tax Models is a comparative member states, taking into account the main features in light analysis of the taxation systems in the European Union of the contribution of indirect and direct taxes and social contributions to the achievement of public revenues. Theme presents a topic of great interest, both theoretically and practically, given that how to place taxes has direct repercussions on the economic development of a country, and undoubtedly influence the rules of an economy, particularly in terms of investment, labor market, and social welfare. It was considered necessary in the first part of the paper to address the conceptual elements and present the most important features of tax systems and the principles that underlie them. It was studied from a theoretical perspective and it found the European tax models as follow： Nordic, continental, Anglo-Saxon, Mediterranean, and catching-up. Then, it analyzed each fiscal European model on each member country, starting from its economic indicators, based on Eurostat data. The objective of the research paper was to present a complete picture of the structure and trends of tax level of the member states of the European Union, sorted by European tax models and the impact of taxation on economic growth and social welfare. The research has concluded that, as long as the rules of the European Union, member states are free to choose their own tax system along with their fiscal policy for economic development and having in a view of their geographical, historical, and political situation.

Vertical Distribution of Fiscal Revenue and Its Effect on Balancing Economic Growth

Widening interregional disparity is an obstacle to China’s development and a serious latent threat to social stability. To alleviate conflicts that may arise from this disparity, the Chinese government established centrally-oriented vertical distribution of fiscal revenue following the 1994 tax-sharing reform. Through massive two-way funding flows, this vertical distribution has promoted the allocation of financial resources and equalization of fiscal capacity across regions. However, as an important institutional arrangement in decentralization, it has played a limited role in balancing interregional economic growth. This is mainly evident in the growth constraint on economically developed regions under large-scale revenue centralization. The effect of the vertical distribution of fiscal revenue clearly interacts with local reliance on non-tax revenue and the level of earmarked grant from the central government, with the former significantly weakening the anti-growth effect of excessive centralization of fiscal revenue and the latter markedly reducing the growth incentive of central government subsidies.View full textDownload full text

Fiscal Transfer, Education Investment and Long-Term Educational Performance

Reasonable allocation of educational powers and expenditure responsibilities between central and local government is crucial to the development of education.The reason lies in the fact that local governments have relatively insufficient incentives to invest in education by using local fiscal revenues,while the central government,which pursues the maximization of the interests of the whole society,could promote education and other public services with spatial spilloves.The fiscal transfer payment has made up for the shortage of local investment in education.This paper uses 2010 census(micro data)and macro fiscal data to verify the effects above.Based on the year of birth and place,this paper constructs the proportion of fiscal transfers for compulsory education in the total fiscal revenue(local fiscal revenue and fiscal transfers)to reflect its structural effect.It is found that every 10%increase in the proportion of fiscal transfers brings at least additional 0.2 year of schoolings for local residents,and the effect of special transfer payments accounts for a larger share,among the three types of transfer payment.In the mechanism test,we find that transfer payment can effectively increase local education expenditure and produce an obvious structural effect.Based on this,in order to further improve the long-term educational performance of individuals,we believe that it is necessary to improve the incentive effect of the transfer payment system on common power and the division of expenditure responsibilities in the field of education.