| Summary: | 碩士 === 逢甲大學 === 會計與財稅所 === 91 === Abstract
Even after the amendment of the Act of Government Revenues and Expenditures Allocation in 1999, the debate for the distribution of Centrally-Allotted Tax Revenues among local governments continues. However, one of common agreements among the scholars is that a reasonable formula of the Distribution for Centrally-Allotted Tax Revenues should consider the fiscal efforts of local governments. The purpose of this study is to employ the RTS (Representative Tax System) of ACIR (Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relation) to measure the fiscal capacities and tax efforts of the governments of Taipei/Kaohsiung cities and 21 counties and cities in Taiwan province. We consistently estimate the yearly fiscal capacities and tax efforts of these 23 local governments for the late 20 years. We further examine the factors that affect the level of tax efforts by employing a Panel data model using the data from 1986 to 2001.
The estimated results show most of the local governments have poor fiscal capacities. The measurement disparity among local governments is significant. The fiscal capacities of Taipei/Kaohsiung and fewer large cities are above the national average. Fiscal capacities of metropolitan areas are better than that of agricultural counties. Municipal governments have above-average capacities but below-average efforts, whereas county and city governments have below-average capacity but above-average effort. More than half of the governments have lower tax effort indexes than the national average level. Governments should pay attention to the trend of decline in tax effort index since 1996 and the historically lowest record in 2001. Since the estimated tax effort index of the national average is below 100 percent every year, it appears there is room for all level of governments to improve collecting tax revenues.
The regression results indicate that the grade of the tax administration has positive sign and statistically significant effect on the tax effort. All the coefficients of the index of fiscal capacity, revenue from aid & assistance, and per capital public expenditure are statistically significantly related to tax effort index with negative signs. As the local fiscal autonomy will be the trend of the future intergovernmental fiscal relations, it is apparently important to consistently measure tax effort indexes of local governments. In order to improve local democratic accountability and local fiscal independence, central government should set up a well system of measuring fiscal capacity and tax effort.
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