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Corporation Tax and the Harberger General Equilibrium Model

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A corporation can be defined as firstly having limited liability, where its owners, the shareholders, are not required to use their personal assets to pay the debts of a failed company; thus the owners and the corporation are separate legal entities. Secondly a corporation has delegated management where the decisions of how the company is run, are left to the managers whom are separate from the owners. Finally the owners of the corporation can easily transfer their share of ownership through the exchanges in the financial markets.

The tax on a company’s profits which is the difference between the company’s gross income and its business costs is thus called the corporation tax. Now it may appear that as the tax is on the profits of the …show more content…

Secondly, it is all capital which bears the burden of the corporate tax, not just the capital in the corporate sector, but also the capital in the non-corporate sector. Harberger finds that the tax burden in the corporate sector would cause a lower after tax return which drives capital into the non-corporate sector. This pushes down non-corporate returns and thus allows for the corporate returns to recover to a point of equilibrium in the long run where the returns in the two industries are at a lower but equal rate.

If the results of Harbenger are to be believed, where owners of capital bear the full or close to the full burden of the tax, then there should be cause for concern for countries implementing high levels of corporation tax. This is because there is a global trend for increasingly higher levels of capital mobility. Therefore, owners of capital would be able to somewhat avoid the tax burden by avoiding countries with high capital tax rates, and thus restricting the flow of capital to those countries. However, given the large number of variables which need to be taken into account when determining the incidence of the corporate tax it is still not completely clear who bears the incidence of the corporate

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