Norman Gemmell

Modelling Corporation Tax Revenue examines the revenue growth properties of corporate income taxes and how firms respond to changes in corporation tax. It provides a companion volume to the authors’ Modelling Tax Revenue Growth, which explores the revenue growth and behavioural response properties of income and consumption taxes. John Creedy and Norman Gemmell examine the corporation tax structure and the implications for revenue elasticity both for individual corporations and for all firms combined. The authors highlight how asymmetries in the treatment of positive and negative profits in the tax structure affect firms’ revenues and behaviours, and demonstrate that the examination of corporation tax revenue requires a detailed treatment of dynamic aspects. Within the book, a dynamic microsimulation model is constructed and used to examine profits and taxes over hypothetical business cycles, concentrating on the revenue elasticity and profit shifting responses to tax changes. This comprehensive yet concise book will appeal to researchers and graduate students in public finance, public economics and taxation, as well as economists in governmental departments and international organisations.

This book demonstrates how the reliable measurement of growth in tax revenues, both for a tax system and for its component taxes, is important for the design of tax policy. The need for discretionary changes in tax parameters (such as tax rates, income thresholds and allowances) is conditional on the expected automatic revenue growth generated by the tax system. The properties that generate these automatic revenue changes are referred to as the built-in flexibility, or revenue responsiveness, of the tax. This concept is the central focus of the analyses in this book, which provides an invaluable review and synthesis of analytical results and demonstrates how this concept can be applied in practice to yield estimates of revenue responsiveness in various countries. John Creedy and Norman Gemmell highlight how an understanding of the principal determinants of a tax system's responsiveness, and a knowledge of the relevant magnitudes, are important for the design and reform of tax policy where both revenue and redistributional considerations are typically central to the policy agenda. Providing extensions of analysis to cover indirect taxes, and direct and indirect taxes combined, as well as empirical applications for several countries, Modelling Tax Revenue Growth will be warmly welcomed by researchers and graduate students interested in public finance and government officials and those in international organisations interested in tax revenue growth.