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Does Informality Hinder Self-Enforcement? Evidence from Value-Added Tax in Pakistan

非正式性会妨碍自我执行吗？

基本信息

批准号：
ES/N002253/1
负责人：
Mazhar Waseem
金额：
$ 19.17万
依托单位：
University of Manchester
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2016
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2016 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FN002253%2F1
关键词：
Does Informality Hinder Self Enforcement

项目摘要

One of the most significant tax policy developments of the last thirty years has been the adoption of VAT by a large number of developing countries. These countries had traditionally been reliant on trade taxes (import duties) for their revenue needs. With the decline of trade taxes in the last two decades of the twentieth century, due mainly to the multilateral trade liberalization agreements, these countries had to look for alternative domestic sources to replace the lost revenues. Since a broad-based VAT was generally considered to be the most suitable alternative, the tax was adopted rapidly in more than 130 countries including almost all developing and transition economies. For example, the number of African countries with a VAT increased from 2 to 30 in the 1990s. Recently, however, doubts have started to emerge if the replacement of trade taxes with VAT in developing countries was a particularly good tax policy considering that a large part of economic activity in these countries takes place in small firms who are extremely difficult to monitor and register. Two recent studies have shown that on average low-income countries were able to recover only a fraction of -- less than 30% -- lost trade revenues through domestic sources. More importantly, such recovery was not significantly stronger in countries who adopted VAT compared to those who did not. In addition, the theoretical results which prove VAT to be superior relative to other alternatives hold only if the government has no difficulty in registering all firms in the economy. Whether and to what extent VAT is suited to the environment in developing economies is ultimately an empirical question. There, however, is still very little evidence on the performance of the tax in such settings. The purpose of this study is to provide such evidence from the experience of one representative economy, Pakistan. There are a number of reasons that make Pakistan an ideal country to research this question. Pakistan has a long history of implementing VAT, introducing it more than two decades ago in 1990. It is also one of the countries where efforts to replace trade revenues with VAT resulted in a substantial decrease -- from 15% to 9% of national output -- in overall tax collection. Furthermore, Pakistan has a large informal sector estimated currently to be around 40% of the official economy. The country, thus, shares important features with a large group of other developing and emerging economies who have had a similar difficult experience with VAT. The results of the research, therefore, will be generalizable and of interest to policy makers in a broad range of countries. One of the more exciting features of the Pakistani context is the nature of data available for the research. Pakistan has available in digitized form returns filed by all registered taxpayers since the introduction of the tax. More importantly, since 2006 it has been mandatory for all registered taxpayers to file a statement containing transaction-wise details of sales and purchases made by them. The availability of this data is unusual and extremely helpful as it will enable us to create a linkage between firms in various parts of a supply chain, which is vital for studying efficiency and compliance questions associated with VAT in developing country settings. In addition, the data also includes income tax returns filed by all corporate and non-corporate firms in Pakistan since 2006. The availability of income tax returns is useful because the exemption cutoff for income tax and VAT are set at different levels. The lower income tax cutoff will help us see how firms who are too small to register for VAT get affected by it. The novel dataset spanning a number of years in combination with very rich variation created by a series of tax changes implies that the proposed research will be in a unique position to generate very useful insights for tax policy in developing countries.

过去三十年中最重要的税收政策发展之一是大量发展中国家采用了增值税。这些国家传统上依赖贸易税（进口税）来满足其收入需求。随着20世纪最后20年贸易税的下降，主要是由于多边贸易自由化协定，这些国家不得不寻找其他国内来源来取代损失的收入。由于普遍认为基础广泛的增值税是最合适的替代办法，130多个国家迅速采用了增值税，包括几乎所有发展中国家和转型经济体。例如，实行增值税的非洲国家数目在1990年代从2个增加到30个。然而，考虑到发展中国家的大部分经济活动发生在极难监测和登记的小公司中，最近人们开始怀疑发展中国家用增值税代替贸易税是否是一项特别好的税收政策。最近的两项研究表明，低收入国家平均只能通过国内来源恢复贸易收入损失的一小部分——不到30%。更重要的是，与未采用增值税的国家相比，采用增值税的国家的这种复苏并不明显更强。此外，证明增值税优于其他替代方案的理论结果只有在政府对经济中的所有企业进行登记没有困难的情况下才成立。增值税是否以及在多大程度上适合发展中经济体的环境，最终是一个实证问题。然而，在这种情况下，关于税收表现的证据仍然很少。本研究的目的是从一个具有代表性的经济体巴基斯坦的经验中提供这样的证据。有很多原因使巴基斯坦成为研究这个问题的理想国家。巴基斯坦实施增值税的历史悠久，早在20多年前的1990年就开始实施。它也是其中一个努力用增值税取代贸易收入导致总体税收大幅下降的国家之一——从占国民产出的15%降至9%。此外，巴基斯坦有一个庞大的非正规部门，目前估计约占官方经济的40%。因此，该国与许多其他发展中国家和新兴经济体有着重要的共同之处，这些国家在增值税方面也有类似的困难经历。因此，这项研究的结果将具有普遍性，并将引起许多国家决策者的兴趣。巴基斯坦背景的一个更令人兴奋的特点是可供研究的数据的性质。自引入税收以来，巴基斯坦所有注册纳税人都可以通过数字化形式提交申报表。更重要的是，自2006年以来，所有注册纳税人都必须提交一份声明，其中包含他们所做的买卖的交易细节。这些数据的可用性是不寻常的，非常有用，因为它将使我们能够在供应链的各个部分之间建立企业之间的联系，这对于研究发展中国家与增值税相关的效率和合规问题至关重要。此外，这些数据还包括自2006年以来巴基斯坦所有公司和非公司公司提交的所得税申报表。所得税申报表的可用性是有用的，因为所得税和增值税的免税截止日期设定在不同的水平。较低的所得税减免将帮助我们了解那些太小而无法注册增值税的公司是如何受到影响的。新数据集跨越数年，结合一系列税收变化产生的非常丰富的变化，意味着拟议的研究将处于一个独特的位置，为发展中国家的税收政策提供非常有用的见解。