Finding and applying the optimal benchmark to identify tax expenditures in China
Creators: name: Guo, Yue Mei
Publisher: name: Monash University
Year: 2017
Subjects: Uncategorized

description: The basic purpose of every tax system is to collect sufficient tax revenue to finance government expenditure. The government can also use the tax system to achieve a broad spectrum of economic, social, cultural and other policy objectives. Tax measures used to achieve such objectives are known as tax expenditures. Tax expenditures are the technical name for spending programs run through the tax system. For government, tax expenditures lead to a loss of revenue; for a taxpayer, tax expenditures reduce tax liability. Tax expenditures are better known in many Organisations for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries as tax reliefs, tax subsidies and tax aids. China has revised its tax laws to bring them closer in substance as well as name and form to those in more advanced economies. However, Chinese public finance still lags in the use of modern analytical tools to evaluate the operation of its tax system. One of the most important tools used market economics is tax expenditure analysis. Tax expenditure analysis has been used as a fundamental tool of tax policy decision making in western countries for more than four decades. To date, there has been limited tax expenditures analysis by the Chinese government or Chinese academics and this thesis will provide an important contribution to the development of tax expenditures analysis in China. The thesis compiles all the explicit and implicit deviations from a neutral benchmark company tax system in the Chinese enterprise income tax law and subjects them to tax expenditure analysis. This involves consideration of whether they amount to subsidies or disincentives for different activities or investments and whether these are appropriate given China’s level of current economic and social development. This thesis seeks to make two important contributions to the study of Chinese tax law. To begin with, it provides the first comprehensive tax expenditure analysis of Chinese tax legislation. Literature to date has identified the desirability of using tax expenditure analysis in China but so far no scholar has taken the next step and attempted an actual tax expenditure analysis of the law. Second, this will be the first study to show how tax expenditure analysis in China has to look at tax rules beyond the enterprise income tax statute because in China the application of basic rules in the statute are found not in the law but rather in implementation regulations issued by the State Council or in circulars issued by the State Administration of Taxation (SAT, the tax administrative agency in China) or the Ministry of Finance (MOF). This thesis will be the first to identify tax expenditures in China by using accounting principles as the basis for identifying a benchmark company tax base, sidestepping entirely the debate in many countries on the appropriate benchmark. This thesis will also set enumerate all the company income tax expenditures in China. While there has been discussion of particular concessions from time to time, this is the first instance in which all tax expenditures have been documented in one place.