Effects Of Local Fiscal Characteristics On Listed Companies’ Tax Burden

With the pace of fiscal and tax reform in China keeps accelerating,as the main body of economic development,enterprises’ tax burden has aroused wide range of social concerns.Since the 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,in order to effectively reduce the tax burden of enterprises,China has successively launched a series of tax cuts and fee reduction policies,"tax cuts and fee reduction" was even elected as one of the top ten economic buzzwords in 2018.In this context,it is of great significance to broaden the research on the influencing factors of the tax burden of enterprises.The researches on the influencing factors of corporate tax burden focus on microcosmic characteristics of enterprises,such as size,financing structure,profitability,and asset structure,few have noted local fiscal characteristics.However,China’s tax administration adopts the principle of registration,the tax burden of listed companies is inevitably affected by local government.Moreover,as for tax burden,studies paid more attention on the income tax burden,while the deviation between the measurement results and the actual tax burden of enterprises is large.Therefore,it is necessary to select more comprehensive indicators to explore the impact of local fiscal characteristics on the tax burden of enterprises.When portraying local fiscal characteristics,this paper selects two indicators: the degree of fiscal decentralization and the degree of fiscal normalization,where the first indicator is measured by the proportion of fiscal revenue within the budget of the province in the total fiscal expenditure,and the second indicator is measured by the proportion of administrative revenue in fiscal revenue within the budget of the province.This paper selects all the A-share listed companies from 2015 to 2018 as samples of empirical research,and delves into the impact of local fiscal characteristics on the tax burden of enterprises,taking local fiscal characteristics as explanatory variables,and tax burden of the enterprise(comprehensive tax burden,tax payment,tax refund,income tax burden and turnover tax burden)as explained variables.The empirical research shows that:(1)the higher the degree of fiscal decentralization,the lower the comprehensive tax burden of the enterprise;(2)the lower the degree of fiscal normalization,the lower the comprehensive tax burden of the enterprise;(3)the local fiscal characteristics have a significant impact on “payments of all types of taxes”,while no significant impact on the “refunds of taxes”,indicating that the difference in the comprehensive tax burden under different financial characteristics mainly stems from the payment of taxes and fees;(4)there are differences in the impact of local fiscal characteristics on corporate income tax burden and turnover tax burden,specifically,corporate turnover tax burden is significantly affected by local fiscal characteristics,while income tax burden is not.The effects of macro fiscal and tax policies at the micro level is closely related to local finance department,and this article provides part of the theoretical material for the mechanism of macro policies on the micro economy.In addition,under the background of accelerating the construction of a new fiscal relationship between the central and local governments,this article also provides theoretical reference for government departments to carry forward tax reform,create a good business environment,and promote sustainable economic development.