산업별 조세규제의 측정과 조세가 산업성장에 미치는 영향 분석

Abstract

10. Industry-level Tax Regulation and Its Impacts | Tae-Jong Kim.Young Lee.Taeyoon Sung

Background and Purpose

This chapter measures the industry-level differences in tax burden by using the OSIRIS database which provides the balance sheet data of 30,000 firms in 120 countries. Given the estimated tax burdens, we also analyze the impact of industry-level tax burden differences on the growth of total economy and each industry. From the analysis, we could provide the policy implications in terms of taxation, regulation, and industrial and economic growth.

Main Results

The main results and policy implications of this analysis are as follows:

First, the effective corporate tax rate is about 29% in the 2000s, which is in the middle range. Since the 1990s, the effective corporate tax rate dropped rapidly due to lower legal tax rates. In the 2000s, we could also observe the reduction of corporate tax rates in other countries. Particularly, in Hungary, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, lower effective corporate tax rates are considerably notable.

Second, we could find only little evidence on the industrial policy through taxation, compared to other countries. After the late 1980s, discriminative taxation has been significantly reduced. Internationally, the degree of discriminative taxation at the industry level shows cross-country differences significantly. Specifically, Asian countries show a higher degree of discriminative taxation at the industry level, while the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Japan show lower levels.

Third, the depreciation rate was quite low in Korea but recently, the depreciation rate has been increased up to 3.7% against assets. However, this level is still quite low compared to the international average. This provides a policy implication that we need to find out the reasons why corporations are not fully utilizing the depreciation scheme. Fourth, the industrial policy or industry-level distortion through taxation could induce an increase in the industry output. However, the policy does not enhance the economic growth of total economy. This indicates that the impact of industrial policy on economic growth is not positive, at least in the case of industrial policy through taxation. Finally, in Korea, we could observe low effective tax burden in the finance, technology, and energy sectors, but high effective tax burden in telecommunications, medical industry, and utilities.

Conclusion

Since the differences in industry-level tax regulation indicate some sort of industrial policy through taxation, this study can be interpreted to measure a kind of industrial policy and its impact on economic growth and industrial output. The effective corporate tax rate was about 29% in the 2000s, which is in the middle range. Since the 1990s, the effective corporate tax rate dropped rapidly due to lower legal tax rates.