H21 - Taxation and Subsidies: Efficiency; Optimal TaxationReturn

This paper uses a duopoly model with horizontally differentiated products to analyse how price collusion in the presence of a uniform tax affects market equilibrium. Moreover, this paper investigates the effect of price collusion on social welfare and the government's decision in setting the optimal tax. We show that in the presence of a uniform tax, instead of bringing social welfare down as is traditionally believed, price collusion affects government policy implication. We further show that firms still prefer colluding rather than competing, for which the government's policy decision becomes the key point. By allowing the optimal tax to be negative, we find that under Bertrand competition the government can impose a positive, zero or negative tax on firms depending on the level of the product differentiation. There is a tendency that the more heterogeneous the products, the more subsidies will be given. Under price collusion, the government always subsidises firms regardless of the degree of product differentiation. Finally, we show that when the products are sufficiently differentiated, the government will subsidise firms more under collusion than they will under Bertrand. In short, firms can use price collusion to induce the government to subsidise them.

The goal of the paper is to asses differences between taxation of various tobacco products in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. When comparing the taxation of cigarette and fine cut tobacco, it is usually expected that one cigarette is equivalent to 1 gram of tobacco, while the European Commission uses a conversion rate of 0.75g. However, to accurately evaluate this disproportion, the real volume of tobacco contained in one cigarette was weighed using calibrated scales. Our experiment showed that the excise duties on tobacco are between 80-51% of the cigarette taxation in the Czech Republic; the range is between 78-47% in Slovakia and 67-37% in Poland, depending on the conversion rate. Even if it is highly unlikely that taxation of both products could be fully equal, we still believe that there is a potential for increasing taxation of fine cut tobacco, which could increase tax revenues by 0.7-2.7 billion CZK in the Czech Republic.

Reverse charge is currently used as a measure against VAT carousel fraud. Its extension to all goods and services is discussed among the tax policy makers at the national and EU level. Opponents of general reverse-charge argue that this method of VAT collection would completely change the nature of the VAT system. One of the practical drawbacks of reverse charge is the negative impact on the cash flow of the public budgets. This article quantifies the average monthly financing available to the State thanks to delayed repayments of input tax to VAT payers under the normal VAT system. This amount equals to almost 53 billion CZK and represents the negative impact of the general reverse charge on the cash flow of the public budgets. A change in the deadline for remitting VAT or introducing VAT advances to be paid prior to the final tax payment would reduce the negative influence on public finances.

Cluster analysis is a method of multivariate data processing. It can be easily applied, for example, by means of statistical software. The article focuses on an application of cluster analysis in the field of taxation. The possibility of applying the method is compared for each tax or groups of taxes at two levels: by an individual state and between selected countries. It is also possible to determine, on the basis of cluster analysis, the impact of taxes on economic operators, which can be sorted according to various criteria (income, types of households represented by their members, etc.). An overview of studies in which the selected method of cluster analysis applied to selected datasets shows that cluster analysis has been supplemented by another statistical method or that the clustering process is repeated on a selected part of a set of objects or characters. The reason is usually better interpretation of results and complementary broader context.

Elasticity of taxable income has increasingly become an important subject matter for economists in recent times. This study provides an estimate for the Czech Republic by exploiting panel data for corporate income tax rates between 2004 and 2009. The severity of the tax evasion and avoidance issue in this country triggers a question about the existence of the elasticity itself. The uniqueness of this study also stems from its focus on proportional tax rates while other influential studies examine this subject for progressive taxation. The result of this research supports a hypothesis about indifference between taxable incme decision and the size of the tax rate; about fifty percent of the observations in the sample are not subject to taxation. The high level of tax avoidance could explain such an outcome intensifying the necessity to fight this fiscal policy phenomenon.

The paper focuses on methods of quantification of VAT evasion. It describes the top-down methods using the National Accounts data for the calculation of the theoretical VAT liability. These methods first compute the theoretical VAT base in the whole economy. Then the base is multiplied by the weighted average VAT rate to get the theoretical VAT. The VAT gap is then obtained as the difference between the theoretical VAT liability and the accrued VAT revenues of the state budget. The first method described is based on the supply and use tables; the second method is a product of the calculation of a weighted average VAT rate by a model (WAR) performed by statistical offices. The third one is derived from the GDP as reported in the National Accounts. Finally, estimates of the VAT gap in the Czech Republic for 2006 to 2010 are compared and the differences in the methods discussed.