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| How Do Tax Cuts Affect China's Income Distribution？ Evidence from Monthly Personal Income Tax Data |
| LU Yuanping, CUI Xiaoyong, ZHAO Ying
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School of Public Finance and Taxation, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law / Innovation and Talent Base for Income Distribution and Public Finance;
School of Economics, Peking University |
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Abstract China's personal income tax system was not established for a single revenue-raising function but to regulate the distribution of income, which contrasts strongly with the tax systems of other major countries, such as the US, where personal income tax accounts for a relatively high proportion of total tax revenue. The main focus of China's personal income tax system is to change the degree of progressive taxation by adjusting the basic expense deduction standard, and thereby affecting the tax burden on individuals' wages and salaries and the macro distribution of income. The standard for basic expense deductions has long attracted the attention of academics and the public. A lower standard for basic deductions reduces both the motivation of individual residents to work and the effect of personal tax in regulating the macro distribution of Chinese residents' income. Therefore, how to preserve the motivations of individual residents to work while also narrowing the social income distribution gap is a challenging issue for personal income tax reform. Currently, most of the literature examining how the basic deduction standard affects personal welfare, such as residents' income, employment, and consumption, is based on simulations of theoretical models. Only a small number of scholars use micro data to analyze how changes in basic deduction standards affect individual consumption behavior, and there is room for further improvement in research design and the accuracy of income distribution and tax data.
As noted, the basic deduction standard in China's personal income tax system is established to prioritize income distribution adjustments. Since the basic deduction standard was first set in 1980, it has been revised seven times to date. The largest reform of the personal income tax system in the past 20 years occurred in September 2011, with the increase in the basic personal income tax deduction standard from RMB2,000 to RMB3,500. This reform, which had important implications, provides a good basis for our research. This paper uses monthly bookkeeping data from China's Urban Household Survey (UHS) for the period from 2010 to 2012, and the 2011 policy that increased the basic personal income tax deduction to construct an individual-year-month difference-in-differences (DID) model to assess how the adjustment of deduction affects both the tax burden on individuals' salaries and wages at the micro level and the macro-level income distribution.
The conclusions of this paper are as follows. First, the individual income tax reform prompted a reduction in the individual tax burden of about 36.31%, with individuals earning 2,000-16,100 yuan per month being most affected by the adjustment of the expense deduction standard, and groups with higher incomes being mostly affected by the adjustment of the tax bracket. Second, although the tax reform reduced the personal income tax burden, its regulatory effect on the social income distribution at the macro level was not strengthened; indeed, it was weakened to an extent. Third, the increase in individual after-tax income following the tax reform had a limited impact on labor supply, but it improved basic consumption for low-income groups and promoted service consumption expenditures of high-income groups.
The contributions of this article are as follows. First, we enrich the literature by providing a more detailed research design than is traditionally used. As personal income tax was paid on a monthly basis around 2011, the most appropriate way to capture the impact of the personal income tax reform is to conduct research on a monthly basis. Therefore, unlike the traditional individual-year DID model, we construct an individual-year-month DID model to better evaluate the impact of policy changes. Second, we determine a more accurate income distribution than has been determined to date. This article confirms that the difference between the income distribution at the theoretical and practical levels is small, and provides evidence that will support future theoretical analyses and empirical research. Third, we provide more detailed metrics than other studies. This paper uses detailed micro data for policy evaluation and removes the impact of two individual income tax reforms that occurred in the same year. The unique monthly bookkeeping data from China's UHS, which include information on income, expenditure, tax payments, and employment at the individual monthly level, provide a sound basis for assessing the impact of the change in the standard for the basic deduction of personal income tax in 2011 on the actual tax burden of individuals and the distribution of income in society.
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Received: 19 August 2022
Published: 16 July 2024
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