Analysis Of The Impact Of Fiscal Pressure On Tax Tasks

After the reform of the tax-sharing system,the tax planning management system of "tax task management" in China has triggered heated discussions and thoughts among the government and the society.Under the tax plan management model,the tax authorities at the local level receive two tax targets from the higher tax authorities and the local government at the local level.When the local government is forced by its own financial pressure but has no other means to effectively make up for the shortage of financial revenue and expenditure,it will make additional adjustments on top of the taxation task targets set by the higher taxation authorities.Since the performance appraisal system of the taxation system takes the completion of taxation tasks as an important appraisal index,this motivates the lower-level taxation authorities to strive to complete the higher target growth rate set by the local government.This paper thus infers that fiscal pressure is an important factor influencing local governments to set tax task targets,and takes this opportunity to study the specific influence of fiscal pressure on tax task targets.First,after combing the literature,this paper finds that the existing studies on tax task targets mainly focus on the influence of tax task targets on the tax administration behavior of taxation authorities,corporate tax burden,and government budget deviation,and more discuss the influence of tax task targets on government and corporate behavior,and not enough research on the influencing factors of tax task targets.Moreover,the research on tax task targets is mainly at the provincial level,with only a small amount of attention to the prefecture level,and even less to the county level.Under China’s administrative system,the county-level government is more complete than the township-level government,and it is the most fundamental combination of China’s "block" administrative system,and the development varies greatly among counties.Based on this,this paper uses countylevel data on tax revenue targets as an anchor point to investigate whether fiscal pressure is an influencing factor on tax revenue targets.It is worth noting that there are many county-level administrative units in China,and it is difficult for the author to manually collect data on tax task targets for all county-level units.Because Guangdong Province is the number one province in China in terms of economy and resident population,but the economic development among different county-level units in the province is extremely unbalanced,and its unbalanced inter-regional development fits the microcosm of the national economic development.this paper selects the county-level units in Guangdong Province as the sample for the countylevel study.Then,this paper uses descriptive analysis to explore the current situation of local tax task targets and fiscal pressure in China.Among them,in order to demonstrate more comprehensively and precisely the distribution differences and cascading phenomenon of China’s tax task targets in the 3 administrative levels of province-city-county,this paper introduces national tax task target data and analyzes China’s local tax task targets at the 3 levels of province,city and county,respectively.The results found that:(1)by comparing the tax task targets at provincial and prefectural levels,and those at prefectural and county levels,it is found that there is indeed a problem of cascading tax task targets in China;(2)during 2012-2021,the tax task targets of local governments at the 3 levels of provinces,cities and counties decreased year by year,and the fiscal pressure faced by local governments at prefectural and county levels increased year by year,and the regional;(3)the regional distribution characteristics of fiscal pressure and tax task targets: fiscal pressure in the west > fiscal pressure in the middle > fiscal pressure in the east;tax task targets in economically backward regions > tax task targets in economically developed regions.Secondly,based on the theoretical analysis in the previous paper and the introduction of China’s tax task system,this paper proposes that there may be two positive and negative mechanisms of action of fiscal pressure on tax task goals,and empirically analyzes the specific effects of fiscal pressure and tax task goals.Using10 years of panel data of 119 county-level administrative units in Guangdong Province from 2012-2021,this paper uses fiscal autonomy as a measure of fiscal pressure and conducts an empirical study using a time-individual two-way fixed effects model.The study finds that an increase in local fiscal pressure significantly raises the tax task target,and furthermore verifies that local fiscal pressure positively affects whether and to what extent the tax task target is raised,and performs robustness tests on the findings of the benchmark regression again by replacing the measure of fiscal pressure and excluding the sample data for 2020-2021.The heterogeneity of the impact of fiscal pressure on tax revenue targets was then tested for differences in economic development regions,administrative divisions at the county level,and changes in the taxation system under the "business-to-business" reform.The results found that :(1)the impact of fiscal pressure on tax task targets is stronger in the Pearl River Delta and Northwest Guangdong regions;(2)by dividing municipal districts,counties and county-level municipalities,it is found that municipal districts fit the results of the benchmark regression well,and the coefficients of fiscal autonomy of counties and county-level municipalities are insignificant and opposite;(3)further dividing the 2012-2021 into the period before and after the " to replace the business tax with a value-added tax",we find that the fiscal pressure has a stronger impact on the tax task target after the implementation of the "tax reform" and the large-scale "tax reduction" policy.Finally,based on the theoretical analysis and empirical results,the author proposes several suggestions for reducing local fiscal pressure and improving tax planning management.