DISTRIBUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE TAX BURDEN ON INDIVIDUALS IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Abstract

The relevance: during the period 2000–2020 in the Russian Federation, there were serious changes in terms of taxation. An assessment of the tax burden on individuals is important in order to answer the question to which degree tax reforms are in line with the initially stated goals, primarily from the fairness criteria point of view. The consequences of these changes for both the budgetary system and the Russian population are still poorly understood, in particular, how changes in social contributions, VAT, and the introduction of various tax incentives and/or spending contributed to reducing income inequality. Such studies are needed both in terms of determining the extent to which various incentives are distorted by tax policy measures, and in terms of assessing the effectiveness of these measures. The object: taxation systems and features of tax administration in world practice and the Russian Federation. The subject of the study is distribution of the tax burden on taxpayers in the Russian Federation. The aim of the study is to assess the distribution of the tax burden by groups of taxpayers and types of taxes in the Russian Federation. When forming the work, such methods as the hypothetical-deductive method, grouping and comparison methods, analysis of international and Russian experience, econometric and statistical analysis, case methods were used. The study used data from the Tax Code of the Russian Federation, Rosstat and the Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Health of the Population of the Higher School of Economics. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the assessment of the distribution of tax burdens of personal income tax, social contributions and VAT by individuals and households, as well as in assessing the degree of regressivity/progressivity of taxation using regression analysis. The result of the work was a report containing: 1. International experience in determining and assessing the tax burden. 2. Generalization of empirical and theoretical approaches to assessing the distribution of the tax burden. 3. Russian experience in terms of the main changes that determine the tax burden on taxpayers. 4. The results of the assessment of the tax burden by categories of taxpayers and various types of taxes. The results allowed us to conclude that when analyzing the tax burden of personal income tax and social contributions on the basis of RLMS data, the distribution of the share of tax payments in the payroll by net labor income is almost identical to the distribution by the total disposable income of an individual. It is important to note, however, that in both cases the share drops sharply when people employed in the informal sector are included in the analysis. For the officially employed, on average for the period under review, the share of tax payments in the payroll ranged from 26.9% to 30%, and for the full sample from 21.3% to 26.3%. When analyzing the distribution of the VAT tax burden, a weaker degree of regressivity was found compared to taxes on labor income. In the future, the authors plan to continue the study of the distribution of the tax burden on individuals in Russia and in the world.

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