The Unassuming Economist

From a new IMF working paper:

“In this paper, we quantitatively investigate the macroeconomic and distributional impacts of fiscal consolidations in low-income countries through VAT, PIT, and CIT. We find that VAT has the least efficiency costs but is highly regressive, while PIT and CIT lead to higher output and consumption drop, but have better distributional implications. Further, we find that cash transfers targeting rural households are able to mitigate the negative distributional impacts of VAT, while public investment shows almost no distributional impacts.”

“Our results suggest that low-income countries indeed face very different equity-efficiency tradeoffs comparing to advanced economies due to their unique economic structure. It therefore is important to investigate quantitatively the impacts of other tax instruments that have been extensively studied under the environment of advanced economies. For instance, we believe that the optimal progressivity of income tax is also a critically important feature in low-income countries. It is also interesting to study whether and how will classical optimal taxation results under complete markets change when migrated to an economy resembling low-income countries. Another limitation of our study is the omission of transitional dynamics in our model, which is important to the evaluation of short-run welfare effects. We leave these extensions to future work.”