Duanjie Chen

Small Business Taxation: Revamping Incentives to Encourage Growth

This study adopts a new approach in assessing the impact of taxes on small business growth and suggests the need to consider new incentives that would be more effective in encouraging small business growth and would also improve the neutrality of the existing tax system. In recent years, federal and provincial governments have provided various corporate tax incentives to small businesses with the aim of helping them grow. While it is commonly believed that small businesses are responsible for most job creation, unfortunately the only study available has shown that while many small businesses are created, few grow. Yet many governments believe that the incentives are important even though little evidence supports the effectiveness of small business corporate concessions. Some provinces have actually eliminated corporate taxes on small businesses or reduced such taxes to a symbolic level (e.g., one to two percent) without there being any empirical support in favour of the effectiveness of such actions. In contradiction to the widely held view that small business tax concessions encourage growth, such small business tax relief could actually be antithetical to growth by creating a “taxation wall.” First, it could result in the breakup of companies into smaller, less efficient-sized units in order to take advantage of tax benefits even if there are economic gains to growing in size. Second, it could encourage individuals to create small corporations in order to reduce their personal tax liabilities rather than grow companies. And third, it could lead to a “threshold effect” that holds back small business from growing beyond the official definition of “smallness,” regardless of the criteria for measuring size (e.g., the size of revenue or assets, or the number of employees). In this paper, we evaluate the impact of both corporate and personal taxes on the growth of small business and we focus in particular on the likely consequences of the aforementioned threshold effect. We use a new approach in assessing the impact of taxes on small business growth by estimating the amount of tax paid on the rate of return to capital as a small business grows in size. We show that small business growth is hampered by the existing tax system. As a business grows, effective tax rates on capital investments made by entrepreneurs virtually double when the business grows from as a little as

Capturing Economic Rents from Resources Through Royalties and Taxes

1 million to over

Canada’s 2010 Tax Competitiveness Ranking: Moving to the Average but Biased Against Services

30 million in asset size. The issue is particularly important to the provinces that have been creating greater gaps between large and small business tax rates. The aim of tax incentives should be to try to avoid creating a wall that inhibits growth in small businesses, but instead flattens corporate and personal taxes with respect to incentives structured to induce growth. We provide some specific recommendations for growth-enhancing incentives that are superior to the small business tax deduction and other incentives of a similar type. Incentives associated with size should be avoided as much as possible, a proposal that is consistent with International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommendations.

Taxing Issues with Privatization : A Checklist

Oil price fluctuations, concerns over the division of resource revenues, and unconventional oil and gas developments are forcing governments to confront the same issue: how to design optimal royalty and corporate tax systems that bring in a publicly acceptable share of revenues without discouraging private investment. This paper surveys tax and royalty systems across six countries, as well as four US states and five Canadian provinces, offering concise analyses of their strengths and shortcomings to describe the best and simplest approaches to both. As in a public-private partnership, government owns the resources and allows private agents to maximize the rents resources generate. An optimal royalty system will thus be rent-based, ensuring that both owner and agent obtain maximally competitive returns so that each has incentives to continue the partnership. Such a system will also be simple, making compliance easy, manipulation difficult, and risks affordable. And it will be stable, instilling in the private sector the confidence needed to invest for the long term. As for corporate income taxes, they should be neutral across business activities, and applied at equal effective rates on economic income, to avoid distorting market forces through subsidies or needless complexity. A clean rent-based tax that allows all costs incurred by producers to be expensed or carried over, along with a corporate income tax system shorn of many of the preferences that negatively affect business activity, should be the w

Federal-Provincial Business Tax Reforms: A Growth Agenda with Competitive Rates and a Neutral Treatment of Business Activities

For the first time since 1975 (the year Canada’s marginal effective tax rates were first measured), Canada has become the most tax-competitive country among G-7 states with respect to taxation of capital investment. Even more remarkably, Canada accomplished this feat within a mere six years, having previously been the least taxcompetitive G-7 member. Even in comparison to strongly growing emerging economies, Canada’s 2010 marginal effective tax rate on capital is still above average. The planned reductions in federal and provincial corporate taxes by 2013 will reduce Canada’s effective tax rate on new investments to 18.4 percent, below the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2010 average and close to the average of the 50 non-OECD countries studied. This remarkable change in Canada’s tax competitiveness must be maintained in the coming years, as countries are continually reducing their business taxation despite the recent fiscal pressures arising from the 2008-9 downturn in the world economy. Many countries have forged ahead with significant reforms designed to increase tax competitiveness and improve tax neutrality including Greece, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. The continuing bias in Canada’s corporate income tax structure favouring manufacturing and processing business warrants close scrutiny. Measured by the difference between the marginal effective tax rate on capital between manufacturing and the broad range of service sectors, Canada has the greatest gap in tax burdens between manufacturing and services among OECD countries. Surprisingly, preferential tax treatment (such as fast write-off and investment tax credits) favouring only manufacturing and processing activities has become the norm in Canada, although it does not exist in most developed economies.

New Estimates of Effective Corporate Tax Rates on Business Investment

Privatization has been a popular strategy for improving efficiency in both market and transition economies. The literature on privatization includes broad discussions of pricing techniques but overlooks tax issues. In reality, a state-owned company loses its privilege of paying no taxes once it is privatized. This change in tax status would certainly complicate the financial transaction of a newly privatized company, affect industry-wide economic efficiency, and change the revenue pattern of governments. Using Ontario Hydro and the Canadian tax regime as examples, the authors provide policymakers with a checklist on tax issues under privatization. Their main observations: 1) The tax status of the company to be privatized must be considered in analyzing the firms financial transition. 2) The economic efficiency targeted by privatization may depend partly on the tax regime for a particular industry. 3) Privatization affects government revenue through the revenue-sharing structure determined by intergovernmental fiscal relationships and cross-border tax arrangements. Time is a factor in tax and transition issues. At the time of privatization, for example, how are assets to be valued for calculating capital gains and cost deductions, for tax purposes? Are the assets transferred to the new owners at fair market value, book value, or at cost, for tax purposes? How should heavy debt loads be treated? Ontario Hydro will not be privatized but it will become taxable. How the taxes will be paid will depend on how the transition is treated. Tax policy will be a key determinant of the industrys future development.

2012 Annual Global Tax Competitiveness Ranking – A Canadian Good News Story

As the federal and provincial governments look to create jobs and attract business investment, productivity-enhanced business tax structures are in high order. Tax structures that combine internationally competitive tax rates on neutral tax bases foster long-term economic growth and generate sustainable tax revenue. This report examines tax policy in Canada over the past few years, specifically its impact on capital investment, labour and the cost of doing business across provinces and industries. Suggestions for tax reform are provided.