报告题目：Powering Tax Capacity by Relieving Misallocation -- Evidence from a Fiscal Squeeze Experiment in China

报告人：陈晓光

时间：2024年6月17日 上午10:00-11:30

地点：西安交通大学创新港涵英楼8001会议室

报告人简介：

Shawn (Xiaoguang) Chen is aSeniorLecturer at the Business School of the University ofWestern Australia. He is also a Research Affiliate of the TTPI at Australian National University, Research Fellow with the NIFS based at Tsinghua University, the IPFT at Renmin University of China, and an adjunct professor at Universitas Airlangga in Indonesia.His research focuses onhow tax systems and rent extraction affect productivity, development and growth. His papers published inJournal of Public Economics,Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization,Economic Letters,International Tax and Public Finance,Journal of Tax Administration,China Economic Review, and in top Chinese journals including Social Science in China (in Chinese《中国社会科学》),Economic Research Journal (in Chinese,《经济研究》). His work received theGregory Chow Best Paper Award, and Best Paper Award from the First Public Finance Forum of China.

讲座摘要：

Developing countries are concurrently ailed by weak tax capacity and severe resource misallocation. This study explores the potential to enhance tax capacity by alleviating misallocation among firms. Leveraging the abolition of agricultural tax in China in 2005 as a quasi-experiment, we employ a difference-in-differences analysis covering the period of 2000-2007. Our findings reveal that local governments responded to the fiscal squeeze by implementing two key measures: increasing the average effective tax rate and reducing the dispersion in tax wedges across firms. Notably, the latter measure contributed to a boost in aggregate productivity, resulting in expanded tax base and higher tax revenue. Specifically, our analysis indicates that the increase in the effective tax rate and the reduction in the tax-wedge dispersion respectively accounted for 42% and 27% of the overall growth in tax revenue. Furthermore, our examination of cross-firm heterogeneity suggests that the tax wedge disproportionately increased on less productive firms, prompting a reallocation of resources. This reallocation led to more productive firms gaining market share at the expense of their less efficient counterparts, ultimately driving up the aggregate productivity. Overall, our results underscore the potential for developing countries to simultaneously enhance tax capacity and aggregate productivity.

经济与金融学院

2024年6月12日