The Impact of Economic Growth and Tax Reform on Tax Revenue and Structure: Evidence from China Experience

Abstract

This paper aims to study the mechanism of how economic growth and tax reform affect total tax revenue and structure over the period (1950-2011). On the basis of the introduction of China’s previous main measures in tax reform, this paper uses methods as descriptive statistics, multi-segment linear regression model and principal component analysis to analyze how economic growth and tax reform affect the total tax revenue and structure mainly from three aspects as the total amount of the tax, the value-added tax and the corporate income tax, which are under the background of tax reform. The empirical results show that economic growth not only has a significant impact on the total tax revenue and structure changes, but also has a long-term stability relationship with total tax revenue. And in a long term, there is no extraordi- nary growth of tax revenue. In addition, every tax reform shows a clear impact on the tax structure, while the impact of changes in the total tax revenue is diminishing over time.