An International Tax Data Laboratory (ITD-Lab) For Studying Taxes, Firms and Development

政府提高税收的能力对于经济发展、为教育、卫生、基础设施和减贫方面的投资提供资金至关重要。正规商业的增长有助于增加收入，是提高生产力和生活水平的关键。我们的研究将使用行政税收数据（ATD）来了解税收与企业增长之间的相互作用，以改善政策。我们试图结合三种类型的分析：我们将研究个人纳税人——主要是公司——如何受到税收制度的影响，以及他们如何对此做出反应。然后，我们将在国家层面（政策制定的层面）汇总这些事实，以理解单个企业的行为对总税收、增长和生产的影响。最后，我们试图研究税收制度和企业行为的这些特征如何随着国家的发展而变化，以及它们在不同发展阶段的国家之间如何变化。以前，由于低收入国家可靠的小组数据有限，这些问题的进展受到阻碍。为了开拓新领域，我们将建立一个国际税务数据实验室（ITD-Lab），汇集来自15-20个不同收入水平国家的公司级税务申报，涵盖多年（通常超过十年）。这是基于财政研究所（Institute for Fiscal Studies）和世界银行（World Bank）之间的独特合作关系。财政研究所是申请人的主办机构，对英国、非洲和亚洲的企业税收数据进行研究。世界银行是申请人的前雇主，向申请人开放了获取拉丁美洲、非洲法语国家和巴尔干地区数据的渠道。税务申报是一种丰富的资源，涵盖了一个国家所有正规企业，并提供了有关企业特征和行为的详细信息。然而，数据的结构部分取决于税收制度的结构，因此来自税务申报的信息不能立即在各国之间进行比较。ITD-Lab将在方法上作出重要努力，以协调各国的数据，确定不同税收制度中共同的概念（例如，公司销售额、利润和所缴税款），并将它们与数据中的相关变量相匹配。然后，我们将利用这些数据研究有关税收和发展的重要问题。首先，我们将研究税收负担如何在不同规模的企业之间分布，并量化税收差异对经济总量的影响。事实上，如果一些公司的税收比其他公司高，这将使它们处于不利地位，并可能降低总产量。其次，我们将研究公司的增长动态，跟踪公司从注册到生产高峰（或关闭）的利润演变过程。我们将研究在不同的经济发展水平和不同的税收制度下，各国的增长模式是如何变化的。最后，我们将研究增值税。我们将研究这种税的实施是如何偏离教科书模式的，以及随着国家的发展，实施是否越来越接近教科书模式。我们的研究结果将为发展中国家税收政策和私营部门支持计划的设计提供参考，如下所述。为了建立一个促进行政税收数据在研究中的应用的网络，我们将每月举办一次系列研讨会，并每年举办一次汇集学者和政策制定者的旗舰会议。此外，我们将通过培训课程和发布代码和半汇总统计数据（例如，所有国家不同规模集团公司的有效税率），促进我们研究的复制和扩展。创新技术发展实验室将努力在世界各地的机构中灌输一种使用行政税收数据进行政策设计的文化。

Governments' ability to raise tax revenue is fundamental for economic development, financing investment in education, health, infrastructure and poverty alleviation. The growth of formal businesses aids revenue-raising and is key to improvements in productivity and living standards. Our research will use administrative tax data (ATD) to understand the interactions between taxation and business growth, with the aim of improving policy. We seek to combine three types of analyses: We will study how individual taxpayers - mostly firms - are affected by the tax system and how they react to it. We will then aggregate these facts at the country level - the level at which policy is designed - to understand the implications of individual firms' behaviours for aggregate tax revenues, growth and production. Finally, we seek to study how these features of tax systems and firm behaviour change as countries develop with time, and how they vary across countries at different stages of development.Progress on these questions has previously been hampered by the limited availability of firm panel data in lower-income countries. To break new ground, we will build an International Tax Data Lab (ITD-Lab) that brings together firm-level tax declarations covering multiple years (often over a decade) from 15-20 countries at different income levels. This is based on a unique partnership between the Institute for Fiscal Studies - the applicant's host institution which conducts research with firm tax data in the UK, Africa and Asia - and the World Bank - the applicant's previous employer which opened her access to data from Latin America, Francophone Africa and the Balkans. Tax declarations are a rich resource, covering all formal firms in a country, and providing detailed information on firms' characteristics and behaviour. Yet, the structure of the data depends partly on the structure of the tax system, so that information from tax declarations is not immediately comparable across countries. ITD-Lab will make an important methodological effort to harmonise the data across countries, identifying concepts which are common across different tax systems (e.g. firm sales, profits and taxes paid) and matching them to the relevant variables in the data.We will then use the data to study vital questions on tax and development. First, we will examine how the tax burden is distributed across firms of different sizes and quantify the impact of tax differences on an economy's total production. Indeed, if some firms are taxed more heavily than others, this puts them at a disadvantage and can lower total production. Second, we will examine firm growth dynamics, tracking how a firms' profits evolve from company registration to peak production (or to closure). We will study how the growth patterns change across countries at different levels of economic development and with different tax systems. Finally, we will study the value-added tax. We will examine how the implementation of this tax diverges from the textbook model and whether the implementation grows closer to the textbook model as countries develop. Our findings will inform the design of tax policies and private sector support programs in developing countries, as discussed below.To build a network promoting the use of administrative tax data in research, we will hold a monthly seminar series and an annual flagship conference bringing together academics and policymakers. In addition, we will facilitate the replication and extension of our research through training sessions and the publication of codes and semi-aggregate statistics (e.g. effective tax rates across firms of different size groups in all countries). ITD-Lab will strive to instil a culture of using administrative tax data for policy design in institutions worldwide.