H20 - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue: GeneralReturn

From the general perspective, municipalities are economic organisations like private companies with their legal subjectivity, own revenues, and property. To better understand their financial management, it is desirable to conduct relevant empirical research, which lacks in the case of the Czech municipal sector and Czech municipalities. This paper aims to analyse and identify the financial behaviour of Czech municipalities within the post-crisis period focusing on the influence of internal and external vulnerability factors. The panel data and linear regression model (fixed-effect model) were used to evaluate how an external crisis affected the financial management of municipalities. The behaviour of municipal financial management is reflected through financial health, financial dependency, or budget rigidity. The outcomes of the analysis are presented and put into perspective with relevant international research.

This study evaluates the effects of opening new segments of mass rapid transit (MRT) lines on housing prices near the MRT stations in Tucheng District and Xinzhuang District, New Taipei City, Taiwan. The effect of proximity to each MRT station is estimated separately with difference-in-differences regressions integrated with spatial econometrics with heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors. The opening of the new segment of the Blue Line, also known as Bannan Line of the Taipei Metro, does not significantly influence housing prices within 600-metre road network distance of the MRT stations, compared to prices outside the distance range. In contrast, and also unlike the findings of prior studies, although the segment and the stations are underground structures, the opening of the new segment of the Orange Line, also known as the Zhonghe-Xinlu Line of the Taipei Metro, significantly decreases housing prices within 600-metre road network distance of the MRT stations, compared to prices outside the distance range, perhaps because the opening of the stations is delayed about one and a half years to be used as a temporary storage area for MRT trains. The findings have implications for homebuyers, investors, mortgage lending institutions and tax assessment authorities.

This article investigates the relationship between environmentally related taxes introduced in OECD countries and air pollution, represented by carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emission levels in the atmosphere. The article makes a statistical analysis of data on environmental taxes, specifically energy and transport taxes, and other variables that might affect air quality in the OECD member countries. The ARDL model used on the panel data of all OECD member countries shows statistical significance in only one out of five models. A subsequent comparative analysis of the reduced sample of OECD countries that are members of the EU exhibits a statistically significant effect of environmentally related tax revenues on the air emission levels, indicating that this relationship is present in the reduced sample.

This paper investigates the government spending-revenue nexus for Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovenia by using quarterly data and a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) approach to cointegration. Our empirical findings support the fiscal synchronization for Slovenia, spend-tax for Czechia, tax-spend for Croatia and Hungary, and institutional separation or fiscal neutrality for Romania and Poland in the long run. Moreover, we find an asymmetric effect for Croatia, Czechia, Hungary and Poland in the long run and for all the countries in the short run. Therefore, our results clearly highlight the importance of asymmetric effects in government spending-revenue nexus. Our findings have some policy implications for these countries, such as providing a better coordination of government spending and revenue decisions and paying attention to the asymmetries.

Many countries decided to launch car scrapping schemes during the 2009 crisis in order to support their car industries and to boost domestic demand. Owing to the existence of significant international trade links in the automotive sector, there is also a strong theoretical foundation for cross-border effects of such scrappage programmes. This paper explores spillovers of the German scheme to the Czech economy on the basis of a close mutual trade link between these two countries and the size of the Czech automotive sector. It is demonstrated that the German programme provided for a significant boost for Czech personal car exports, which were also coupled with increased imports due to large import requirements of the Czech automotive segment. Overall, the contribution of first-round effects of the German car scrapping scheme to the Czech real GDP growth in 2009 is estimated to have reached between 0.4 and 0.5 percentage points.

Health-motivated taxes have spread over the world to reduce increasing obesity and corresponding health care costs. These taxes have not yet been implemented in the Czech Republic, in contrast to some other, mainly European countries. However, the introduction of a fat tax has been discussed frequently in the Czech Republic during the last few years; here, we provide empirical evidence in order for this public debate to be better informed. We use detailed microeconomic data to estimate the impact of potential fat taxes on household expenditure and government revenues in the Czech Republic. We evaluate the impact of three types of fat taxes: ad valorem, specific per kilogram of product and specific per kilogram of fat. We simulate these in such a way that they all raise the same budget revenues as a 10% ad valorem tax on fat-rich products. Accounting for higher food expenditures in the aggregate national accounts than in the detailed microeconomic data results into higher budget revenues, 7.3 and 6.1 billion Czech korunas, respectively. Overall we find, and thus confirm the overwhelming evidence from other countries, that fat taxes are regressive in income.

The aim of the paper is to explore impact of globalization on the tax mixes of the OECD countries. The research object is the tax mix of 21 OECD member countries in the period 1965 - 2003. The relation of tax mixes and globalization, which expresses oneself through a tax competition, is analysed by methods of multidimensional statistical analysis. First, the cluster analysis enables us to identify countries` clusters (subgroups of the OECD group of countries) with similar tax mixes in the observed period. Consequently, the discriminatory analysis explains the reasons of the resulting grouping of the countries. Within the scope of the discriminatory analysis we take into account selected variables of globalization quantified on the basis of the globalization indices (economical, social and political index). The cluster and discriminatory analysis results confirm that the tax mixes in the OECD countries have been gradually approaching under the pressure of globalization.

In the immediate period before adoption of euro many debates in Slovenia deal with fulfillment of Maastricht criteria. Slovenia has never had any significant problems with Maastricht fiscal criteria, but this does not mean that it has long-term sustainable fiscal situation. The purpose of this analysis is analyze (non)sustainability of Slovenia's fiscal stance. The methodology is based on objective analysis of long-term public finance's stability/sustainability. The analysis shows that Slovenia exceeded several times the level of sustainability in previous years. In next period the circumstances could only worsen unless necessary fiscal reform and other policy measures (especially reform of public-debt management) are introduced.