The Laffer Curve Strikes Again

In the private sector, no business owner would be dumb enough to assume that higher prices automatically translate into proportionately higher revenues. If McDonald's boosted hamburger prices by 30 percent, for instance, the experts at the company would fully expect that sales would decline. Depending on the magnitude of the drop, total revenue might still climb, but by far less than 30 percent. And it's quite possible that the company would lose revenue. In the public sector, however, there is very little understanding of how the real world works. Here's a Reuters story I saw on Tim Worstall's blog, which reveals that Bulgaria and Romania both are losing revenue after increasing tobacco taxes.

Cash-strapped Bulgaria and Romania hoped taxing cigarettes would be an easy way to raise money but the hikes are driving smokers to a growing black market instead. Criminal gangs and impoverished Roma communities near borders with countries where prices are lower -- Serbia, Macedonia, Moldova and Ukraine -- have taken to smuggling which has wiped out gains from higher excise duties. Bulgaria increased taxes by nearly half this year and stepped up customs controls and police checks at shops and markets. Customs office data, however, shows tax revenues from cigarette sales so far in 2010 have fallen by nearly a third. ...Overall losses from smuggling will probably outweigh tax gains as Bulgaria struggle to fight the growing black market, which has risen to over 30 percent of all cigarette sales and could cost 500 million levs in lost revenues this year, said Bezlov at the Center for the Study of Democracy. While the government expected higher income from taxes in 2010 it has already revised that to the same level as last year. "However, this (too) looks unlikely at present," Bezlov added. Romania, desperately trying to keep a 20 billion-euro International Monetary Fund-led bailout deal on track, has a similar problem after nearly doubling cigarette prices in 2009 then hiking value added tax. Romania's top three cigarette makers -- units of British American Tobacco, Japan Tobacco International and Philip Morris -- contributed roughly 2 billion euros to the budget in taxes in 2009, or just under 2 percent of GDP. They estimate about a third of cigarettes in Romania are smuggled and say this could cost the state over 1 billion euros.

Anti-Tax Competition Schemes by High-Tax Nations Will Expand the Underground Economy

Regular readers know that I am a big supporter of international tax competition as a mechanism to limit the greed of the political elite. Unfortunately, the statists are having some success in their efforts to undermine the fiscal sovereignty of low-tax jurisdictions. Even the Swiss have been forced to weaken their human rights policy of protecting financial privacy. So does this mean the politicians from high-tax nations will get more money to spend? Probably not. One reason is that "better" enforcement of high tax rates on saving and investment will have the same economic impact as an increase in tax rates. This, of course, will mean less saving and investment, which translates into slower growth and a smaller tax base. Another reason is that restrictions on the ability to shift economic activity across border to escape oppressive taxation will lead many people to find domestic strategies as a substitute means of protecting their income and assets. An article by a Romanian academic explains further and notes that low-tax jurisdictions will continue to enjoy better economic performance.

It is of course illegal not to declare assets and income held abroad, but the fact that some people are driven to this extreme suggests that in some countries taxes have reached unacceptably high levels. In exactly the same fashion, people are also driven to hide some of their economic activity from the tax man, giving rise to the well known phenomenon of the underground economy. In fact, tax evasion is as old as taxes themselves, and the best way to minimize it is to levy reasonable taxes. International tax evasion and the local underground economy provide the two main escape routes. In modern democratic times, they also set implicit limits to the growth of government. They are both illegal, but the local shadow economy is now so widespread that governments know that they cannot enforce compliance without becoming hugely unpopular (suggesting that high taxes are, in fact, not as widely accepted by the population as some would like to think). Limiting international tax competition looks a much easier bet. However, if high-tax countries are successful in stopping the shift of savings to tax havens by enforcing transparency and information exchange, they will displace, but not halt, tax evasion and fiscal competition. The underground economy, both local and international, will grow. In the meantime, wealthy people and their assets will continue to move from high to low tax environments. Over time, the economically more attractive places will still enjoy much higher rates of economic growth.

Greece's Problem Is High Tax Rates, not Tax Evasion

The New York Times has an article describing widespread tax evasion in Greece, along with an implication that the country's fiscal crisis is largely the result of unpaid taxes and could be mostly solved if taxpayers were more obedient to the state. This is grossly inaccurate. A quick look at the budget numbers reveals that tax revenues have remained relatively constant in recent years, consuming nearly 40 percent of GDP. The burden of government spending, by contrast, has jumped significantly and now exceeds 50 percent of Greek economic output.

The article also is flawed in assuming that harsher enforcement is the key to compliance. As this video shows, even the economists at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development admit that tax evasion is driven by high tax rates (which is remarkable since the OECD is the international bureaucracy pushing for global tax rules to undermine tax competition and reduce fiscal sovereignty).



Ironically, the New York Times article quotes Friedrich Schneider of Johannes Kepler University in Austria, but only to provide an estimate of Greece's shadow economy. The reporter should have looked at an article that Schneider wrote for the International Monetary Fund, which found that:

Macroeconomic and microeconomic modeling studies based on data for several countries suggest that the major driving forces behind the size and growth of the shadow economy are an increasing burden of tax and social security payments... The bigger the difference between the total cost of labor in the official economy and the after-tax earnings from work, the greater the incentive for employers and employees to avoid this difference and participate in the shadow economy. ...Several studies have found strong evidence that the tax regime influences the shadow economy. ...In Austria, the burden of direct taxes (including social security payments) has been the biggest influence on the growth of the shadow economy... Other studies show similar results for the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and the United States. In the United States, analysis shows that as the marginal federal personal income tax rate increases by one percentage point, other things being equal, the shadow economy grows by 1.4 percentage points. ...A study of Quebec City in Canada shows that people are highly mobile between the official and the shadow economy, and that as net wages in the official economy go up, they work less in the shadow economy. This study also emphasizes that where people perceive the tax rate as too high, an increase in the (marginal) tax rate will lead to a decrease in tax revenue.

It is worth noting the Schneider's research also shows why Obama's tax policy is very misguided. The President wants to boost the top tax rate by nearly five percentage points, and that's on top of the big increase in the tax rate on saving and investment included in Obamacare. Based on Schneider's research, we can expect America's underground economy to expand.

Shifting back to Greece, Schneider does not claim that tax rates are the only factor determining compliance. But his research indicates that more onerous enforcement regimes are unlikely to put much of a dent in tax evasion unless accompanied by better tax policy (i.e., lower tax rates). Moreover, compliance also is undermined by the rampant corruption and incompetence of the Greek government, but that problem won't be solved unless politicians reduce the size and scope of the public sector. Needless to say, that's not very likely. So when I read some of the details in this excerpt from the New York Times, much of my sympathy is for taxpayers rather than the greedy politicians that turned Greece into a fiscal mess:

In the wealthy, northern suburbs of this city, where summer temperatures often hit the high 90s, just 324 residents checked the box on their tax returns admitting that they owned pools. So tax investigators studied satellite photos of the area — a sprawling collection of expensive villas tucked behind tall gates — and came back with a decidedly different number: 16,974 pools. That kind of wholesale lying about assets, and other eye-popping cases that are surfacing in the news media here, points to the staggering breadth of tax dodging that has long been a way of life here. ...Such evasion has played a significant role in Greece's debt crisis, and as the country struggles to get its financial house in order, it is going after tax cheats as never before. ...To get more attentive care in the country’s national health system, Greeks routinely pay doctors cash on the side, a practice known as “fakelaki,” Greek for little envelope. And bribing government officials to grease the wheels of bureaucracy is so standard that people know the rates. They say, for instance, that 300 euros, about $400, will get you an emission inspection sticker. ...Various studies have concluded that Greece’s shadow economy represented 20 to 30 percent of its gross domestic product. Friedrich Schneider, the chairman of the economics department at Johannes Kepler University of Linz, studies Europe's shadow economies; he said that Greece’s was at 25 percent last year and estimated that it would rise to 25.2 percent in 2010.