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In a two-country model, the citizens of a ‘big home country’ can either fictitiously move residence to a ‘small foreign country’ where residence-based taxes are lower (external tax avoidance), or under-report the tax base at home (internal tax avoidance). Tax setting is the result of Cournot-Nash competition between revenue maximizing governments, with the home government also setting two types of administration policies, one for each form of tax avoidance. We show that although it is optimal to employ both types of administration policies, which in themselves are both effective at tackling the targeted form of tax avoidance, the optimum is characterized by a tradeoff in terms of policy outcomes: either internal avoidance increases and external avoidance decreases, or the opposite, depending on the characteristics of the fiscal environment.

Individual preferences over public policies should ideally be based on the possession of correct information about their reality. To test whether this holds, we conducted four waves of a survey, every six months since May 2020 (still under the COVID-19- lockdown), asking basic macro questions regarding the level of tax burden, of public debt, and of the underground economy in Spain. The percentage of correct responses (defined within broad ranges) never reaches 35%, and it is by far lowest for public debt. For the tax burden, leftwing individuals (with respect to right-wing) make more errors, and highly educated people (with respect to the rest of society) make fewer. No clear deterministic patterns arise for públic debt and for the underground economy.I Independently of the percentage of errors, we infer the existence of relative biases across different social characteristics: highly educated people tend to undervalue the level of the tax burden and of the underground economy and overvalue the level of public debt; leftist individuals undervalue the level of the tax burden and of the public debt but overvalue the level of the underground economy. There are also significant gender biases: with respect to men, women overvalue the tax burden and the importance of the underground economy, and undervalue the level of public debt. This misinformation and biases correlate with the marginal willingness to pay taxes (MWTP). MWTP is 10% higher under the presence of misinformation. This is particularly so for those individuals who undervalue the real level of the tax burden. Although COVID-19 generates greater interest to collect information, including about fiscal issues, there is a decrease in knowledge. The pandemic seems to have produced an excess of information up to causing misinformation. We also observe a general tendency to undervalue the level of public debt provoked by the exposure to COVID-19, which might be caused by the lax fiscal policy carried out during the pandemic.

El empobrecimiento ciudadano a causa de la inflación ha provocado distintas reacciones tributarias en los gobiernos autonómicos de España y ha abierto un debate en torno a si, para capear el temporal, deben subirse o bajarse los impuestos.

Sol·licitant de l'informe: Gerència d'Àrea d'Economia, Recursos i Promoció Econòmica

Reproducció del document publicat a: https://theconversation.com/solucionara-el-acuerdo-del-g20-la-elusion-fiscal-de-las-multinacionales-163938, Hace nada más y nada menos que 45 años un libro blanco del Ministerio de Hacienda de España señalaba: “Otra forma análoga [de elusión fiscal] consiste en el desplazamiento de beneficios entre diversas sociedades constitutivas de un grupo, de forma que estos aparezcan en los lugares más convenientes”.

Dada la capacidad normativa de que disponen las CCAA de régimen común y foral en el IRPF, ¿puede aumentar la descentralización fiscal el bienestar social? Para valorarlo, nos centramos en un elemento legal paradigmático: el tipo marginal máximo que aplica sobre la renta laboral. Utilizando el instrumental que nos ofrece la teoría de la imposición óptima (Saez, 2001), comparamos – a partir de micro-datos de la Encuesta de condiciones de vida (INE) – los tipos reales con los óptimos. Obtenemos que existen, para todas las CCAA, discrepancias; estando siempre los marginales óptimos por encima de los reales. La discrepancia promedio es de 10 puntos porcentuales (p.p.), resultado máxima (mínima) para la CA de Madrid (Navarra), 23 (2) p.p. Eso sí, partiendo del tipo que resulta de la ausencia de actividad legislativa por parte de los gobiernos subcentrales, excepto cuatro CCAA, todas han aproximado los marginales hacia "su" óptimo. Given the tax power in hands of the Autonomous Communities (ACs) in the PIT, we wonder whether decentralization might be welfare-enhancing. To asses this, we focus on a paradigmatic legal element: the top marginal tax rate on labor income. Taking advantage of the theoretical framework of the recent optimal tax theory (Saez, 2001), we compare – from microdata of the Survey of Life Conditions (conducted by the Spanish National Statistical Institute – the real rates with the optimal ones. There is a discrepancy for all ACs; being for all of them the optimal rate above the real one. The average discrepancy is 10 percentage points (p.p.), being maximum (minimum) for the AC of (Navarre), 23 (2) p.p. In any case, taking the tax rate in absence of subcentral legislative action as the benchmark, all but four ACs have set their tax rate closing the gap with "their" optimum.

We present new cross-country empirical evidence that tax system complexity affects the location of international investment. The evidence comes from a database of foreign direct investment (FDI) bilateral flows for all OECD countries over the 2013-2016 period, and from the Doing Business survey, which collects several measures of tax system complexity and effective tax rates. By means of a gravity model, we consider the impact of destination and parent country characteristics on firm investment decisions. An increase in the difference between tax complexity in the home country and the destination country is related with an increase in FDI outflows from home to destination. We do not find any significant impact of tax rate differentials on FDI outflows.

I design a basic model based on the role of the tax administration as a lender of last resort (Andreoni 1992). If the administration's sole concern is for tax revenues, then it is optimal for it to make taxpayers take an unfair gamble. However, if it also gives some weight to the taxpayers' welfare in its objective function and this is sufficiently large, the situation might be reversed so that the auditing probability is lower and the evasion rate is higher. Under decreasing absolute risk aversion preferences, optimal enforcement is counter-cyclical (that is, greater liquidity constraints imply a higher level of enforcement) unless the administration attaches a considerable amount of weight to taxpayers' utility, which - at least in "normal times" - seems implausible. These theoretical results are complemented with numerical simulations.

Para empezar, aclaremos que la figura tributaria que vamos a tratar no es una tasa (tributo por cuyo pago el contribuyente recibe una contraprestación directa del sector público), sino un impuesto.

This Report has been prepared for the European Commission, DG TAXUD under contract TAXUD/2017/DE/329, "Study and Reports on the VAT Gap in the EU-28 Member States" and serves as a follow-up to the six reports published between 2013 and 2018. This Study contains new estimates of the Value Added Tax (VAT) Gap for 2017, as well as updated estimates for 2013-2016. As a novelty in this series of reports, so called "fast VAT Gap estimates" are also presented the year immediately preceding the analysis, namely for 2018. In addition, the study reports the results of the econometric analysis of VAT Gap determinants initiated and initially reported in the 2018 Report (Poniatowski et al., 2018). It also scrutinises the Policy Gap in 2017 as well as the contribution that reduced rates and exemptions made to the theoretical VAT revenue losses. In 2017, growth in the European Union (EU) continued to accelerate with a combined real GDP growth of 2.5 percent, providing a sound environment for an increase in VAT collections. As a result, VAT revenue increased in all Member States (MS). An increase in the base was the main, but not the only, source for growth. Increase in compliance contributed to an approximate 1.1% increase in VAT revenue. In nominal terms, in 2017, the VAT Gap in EU-28 MS fell to EUR 137.5 billion, down from EUR 145.4 billion. In relative terms, the VAT Gap share of the VAT total tax liability (VTTL) dropped to 11.2 percent in 2017 and is the lowest value in the analysed period of 2013-2017. Fast estimates for 2018 indicate that the downward trend will continue and that VAT Gap will likely fall below EUR 130 billion in 2018. [...]

In this Report, the Authors present the new Value Added Tax (VAT) Gap estimates for 2016, as well as updated estimates for 2012-2016. In addition to the analysis of the Compliance Gap, this Report examines the Policy Gap in 2016 as well as the contribution that reduced rates and exemptions made to the theoretical VAT revenue losses. Moreover, the Report contains an econometric analysis of VAT Gap determinants, which is a novelty introduced from this year's Study. In 2016, most European Union (EU) Member States (MS) saw positive tailwinds with a combined real GDP growth of 2.0 percent. As a result of a growing base and increasing VAT compliance, VAT revenue increased in all MS with three exceptions. Most pronounced is the case of Romania, where VAT revenue decreased in response to reduction of the standard rate by four percentage points. In nominal terms, in 2016, the VAT Gap in EU-28 MS fell below EUR 150 billion and amounted to EUR 147.1 billion. In relative terms, the VAT Gap share of the VAT total tax liability (VTTL) dropped to 12.3 percent from 13.2 percent in 2015, and is the lowest value in the analysed period of 2012-2016. Denoted at the share of GDP, the VAT Gap in 2016 amounted to 0.99% compared to 1.05% in 2015. Of the EU-28, the VAT Gap share decreased in 22 countries and increased in six - namely, Romania, Finland, the UK, Ireland, Estonia, and France. The biggest declines in the VAT Gap - of over five percentage points - occurred in Bulgaria, Latvia, Cyprus, and the Netherlands. The smallest Gaps were observed in Luxembourg (0.85 percent), Sweden (1.08 percent), and Croatia (1.15 percent). The largest Gaps were registered in Romania (35.88 percent), Greece (29.22 percent), and Italy (25.90 percent). Overall, half of EU-28 MS recorded a Gap below 9.9 percent. [...]

La brecha fiscal es un concepto de importancia creciente en el ámbito de las administraciones tributarias que indica la diferencia entre la recaudación impositiva efectiva y la que debería obtenerse de haber un cumplimiento fiscal perfecto. Su estimación ofrece una información muy relevante sobre el tamaño relativo y la naturaleza del incumplimiento fiscal, así como sobre su evolución a lo largo del tiempo. En este artículo se destaca su utilidad como herramienta de gestión de la propia administración tributaria y para mejorar su rendición de cuentas ante la sociedad, señalándose también sus posibles debilidades metodológicas y las cauciones a la hora de interpretar sus resultados. Asimismo, se presenta la metodología y los resultados obtenidos al estimar la brecha fiscal de Cataluña, a partir de microdatos de los tres impuestos relacionados con la riqueza (patrimonio, sucesiones y transmisiones) más importantes que administran las comunidades autónomas españolas de régimen común.

Decentralization is believed to constitute the optimal institutional arrangement for public good provision. In contrast to centralization, it is thought to offer a better match between provision and individual preferences. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the Spanish decentralization process undergone since 1980s exploiting survey data. A higher degree of satisfaction is expressed when education and health provision is assigned to the intermediate tier of government rather than to central government. This, however, is not recorded for largest regions or for the case of the justice administration, where the responsibility assigned to (some) regions is of a merely administrative nature.

The taxation of high-income earners is of importance to every country and is the subject of a considerable amount of recent academic research. Such high-income earners contribute substantial amounts of tax and generate significant positive spillovers, but are also highly mobile: a 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate increases outmigrations by around 1.5 to 3%. We review research into taxation of high-income earners to provide a synthesis of existing theoretical and empirical understanding. We offer various avenues for potential future theoretical and empirical research.

Las restricciones informativas sobre la capacidad económica de los contribuyentes hacen inevitable en su lugar, el gravamen de proxies, tales como la renta o la riqueza ...

The literature on horizontal tax interdependence pays limited attention to interactions in administrative policies, although they can play a large role in determining the amount of tax revenues collected. We investigate the incentives for sub-central tax authority cooperation in a decentralised context, with the aim of identifying the determinants of that cooperation. Our results are congruent with standard theory; in particular, the existence of reciprocity is essential for sharing tax information, but there is sluggishness in this process, which is partly the result of the short-sighted behaviour of tax authorities influenced by budget constraints. Hence, this is good news for the functioning of a decentralised tax administration as, in the medium to long run, the gains to be made from sharing tax information are achieved.

La introducción de la cesta impositiva ha sido la principal reforma del sistema de financiación autonómica vigente desde enero de 2002. El objetivo de este trabajo es obtener, a partir de unas necesidades básicas de financiación, su composición óptima para cada una de las CCAA de régimen común y para el gobierno central. La optimalidad de esta cesta se obtiene a partir de la minimización de la varianza de la cesta dado un determinado rendimiento impositivo (Markowitz, 1952) y garantizando, a la vez, la suficiencia financiera en el año base. Los resultados que obtenemos al aplicar tal metodología para el período 2002-07 muestran una relativa heterogeneidad entre las CCAA en la composición de la cesta óptima. Cuando del binomio rentabilidad-riesgo financiero se valoran ambos componentes, los impuestos preferidos son el impuesto sobre hidrocarburos, el impuesto sobre el alcohol y el impuesto sobre el tabaco. Dado que estos impuestos especiales no garantizan la suficiencia financiera, éstos se complementan con participaciones en el IVA y en el IRPF. En los casos extremos en que sólo se valora o bien el componente de riesgo o bien el de rentabilidad, respecto de tales participaciones complementarias, las CCAA prefieren el IVA y el IRPF, respectivamente. The introduction of a mix of tax shares has been the main reform of the Spanish regional financing system, in effect since January 2002. The aim of this paper is obtaining, given a basic expenditure needs, its optimal composition for each regional government (so-called «Comunidad Autónoma de Régimen Común») and for the central government. The optimality of the mix comes from the minimisation of the variance of the mix of taxes given a certain tax yield (Markowitz, 1952) and guaranteeing, at the same time, the financial sufficiency in the first year. The results obtained from applying the methodology for the period 2002-07 show a certain heterogeneity among regions with respect to the composition of the optimal tax mix. As long as both tax yield and financial risk are taken into consideration, the preferred taxes are gasoline taxes, alcohol taxes, and cigarette taxes. Given that these excise taxes do not guarantee financial sufficiency, these are complemented with tax shares in the VAT and in the personal income tax. In the extreme cases in which either only tax yield or financial risk is taken into account, with respect to the complementary tax shares, regions prefer the VAT and the personal income tax, respectively.

La reforma fiscal en España ha sido una demanda recurrente en los últimos tiempos, posiblemente reforzada por la crisis económica. Esta fue aprobada a finales de 2014, entrando en vigor en 2015 y 2016. No se trata de una reforma global, habiéndose centrado en el IRPF y en el impuesto sobre sociedades. Este artículo repasa sus, a nuestro entender, aspectos más relevantes y, de manera novedosa, para identificar sus disfunciones, los contrasta con la opinión de los asesores fiscales, actores clave en nuestro sistema fiscal, dado el alcance mayoritario del mecanismo de autoliquidación. En general, se puede concluir que los trade-offs resueltos en esta reforma van en la dirección de elimi­nar, cuanto menos parcialmente, disfunciones previas, aunque, como se ha sugerido, hay aspectos todavía sin tratar (IVA o imposición sobre la riqueza).

Ascertaining the cause/s of differences in performance between units of the public administration is at least as important as quantifying the very level of individual performance. We identify two causes: inefficiency and congestion. Inefficiency might be due to the fact that inputs are of relatively low quality (e.g, temporary workers) and/or, for a given quality, to the fact that inputs do not have incentives to exert their maximum level of effort. Congestion arises when the number of new cases is above the number that can be solved when full efficiency is achieved. This decomposition is applied to the universe of Catalonian first instance courts for the period 2005-13 applying a fixed-effect panel stochastic frontier model (Wang and Ho, 2010). In this particular case, we conclude that poor performance is not due to inefficiency on the courts' side, but to an increase in the litigation demand, that is, to congestion, while inefficiency tends to decrease along time and is correlated with the presence of temporary judges.

Resumen basado en el de la publicación El objetivo es describir el sistema de evaluación continua diseñado para una asignatura muy masificada utilizando la plataforma Moodle, así como analizar los resultados obtenidos. Las pruebas de evaluación se han implementado a través de cuestionarios en la plataforma Moodle. El diseño de este sistema de evaluación para cuestionarios online ha permitido aplicar un sistema de evaluación continua igual a todos los grupos, con un feedback inmediato. Los resultados obtenidos permiten concluir que la valoración de esta metodología de aprendizaje y sistema de evaluación es positiva. Es importante destacar que los resultados son muy sensibles en función de cómo se considere la nota de la evaluación continua para determinar la nota final. ESP