The PRC enterprise income tax law was enacted on January 1, 2008, with accordance to which the enterprise income tax law system has been changing. It took a long time to promulgate the law just as it takes and will take certain period to integrate the system from the constitutional law to tax polices. The lack of taxing power under constitutional law, the silence of a basic tax law, and the arb...

Although developing countries face high levels of income inequality, they rely more on consumption taxes, which tend to be linear and are less effective for redistribution than a non-linear income tax. One explanation for this pattern is that the consumption taxes are generally more enforceable in these economies. This paper studies the optimal combination of a linear consumption tax, with a no...

Discussions of the “ideal” form of individual income taxation have largely been based on some variant of the standard suggested by Haig (1921) and Simons (1938). This “Haig-Simons” (H-S) standard argues that an ideal income tax should be imposed on “comprehensive income”, and the H-S standard has been used to justify the frequently heard call for a “Broad-based, Low-rate” tax reform strategy. H...

This paper develops a positive theory of overlapping income taxation in a federation of states. Its main motivation comes from the observation that in the U.S. states income tax rates are significantly lower than the federal income tax rate. The analysis shows that in a federal system total productivity dispersion between the states determines the federal tax rate. In fact, there exists a posit...

This paper derives optimal income tax formulas using compensated and uncompensated elasticities of earnings with respect to tax rates. A simple formula for the high income optimal tax rate is obtained as a function of these elasticities and the thickness of the top tail of the income distribution. In the general non-linear income tax problem, this method using elasticities shows precisely how t...

Can Progressive State Taxes Reduce Inequality? Andrew Leigh Economics Division Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University [email protected] www.andrewleigh.com October 2004 Can income taxes levied at a state or regional level affect the distribution of gross incomes? Or will workers merely move between regions, causing pre-tax wages to adjust? This question is relev...

In this paper, we present a micro estimate detennining taxable income as a function of gross income and all major deduction options depending on ho~sehold and asset categories. It is shown that tax savings strongly increase with ulcreasing income, resulting in a decreasing effective marginal tax rate for the highest income groups. We compute a lower bound on 1983 aggregate income tax losses' to...

2 " The Clinton revenue estimates are based on the fallacy that taxpayers will not change their behavior in response to a 37% jump in their marginal tax rates... " Martin Feldstein (1993) Estimating the effect of income taxes on individual behaviors such as labor supply, compensation, saving, and taxable income have been focal points of economic research for several decades. Because income taxe...

The negative income tax represents one of the fundamental ideas of modern welfare policy. Based on a simple application of elementary price theory, it has a powerful lesson for work incentives in welfare programs. The academic literature on the negative income tax has raised two difficulties with it, one concerning work disincentives arising from an increase in the eligibility point, and the ot...

The negative income tax represents one of the fundamental ideas of modern welfare policy. Based on a simple application of elementary price theory, it has a powerful lesson for work incentives in welfare programs. The academic literature on the negative income tax has raised two difficulties with it, one concerning work disincentives arising from an increase in the eligibility point, and the ot...