Second-best optimal taxation of capital and labor in a developing economy

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Peñalosa, CG; Turnovsky, SJ
• 署名单位: University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2004.06.002
• 发表日期: 2005
• 页码: 1045-1074
• 关键词: endogenous growth; optimal taxation; Informal sector; developing economies

摘要

As commercial integration reduces the reliance on foreign trade taxation, raising tax revenue has become a major concern for the governments of developing economies. This paper examines how the tax burden in a developing economy should be distributed between capital income and labor income. We study a two-sector model, where the traditional sector is informal and consequently cannot be taxed by the government. In this setup, we find that the optimal (second-best) tax structure in order to raise a certain amount of revenue requires to tax capital income at least as much as labor income, and possibly more. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.