| The purpose of this article is to answer the academic proposition of the optimal incentive of China’s R&D tax policy.Since China proposed the development strategy of original innovation and building an innovative country in 2006,various industrial support policies for original innovation have sprung up.China’s existing R&D subsidy data to encourage technological innovation shows that R&D tax incentives have gradually become an important policy tool for the Chinese government to encourage enterprises to participate in scientific and technological activities.Data show that after 2008,the number of R&D tax incentives for enterprises above designated size(large and medium-sized enterprises from 2008 to 2010)is significantly higher than the government’s direct funding,and the former is about twice the latter.R&D tax incentives increased from 40.1 billion yuan in 2009 to 112.9 billion yuan in 2015,while direct government funding increased from 20.3 billion yuan in 2009 to 51.6 billion yuan in 2015.Although the government has provided a large amount of R&D tax support to enterprises,it is difficult to effectively improve the innovation quality of enterprises.There are many examples of fraudulent tax deduction through financial fraud.Since 2008,a total of 671 high-tech enterprises have been disqualified.The crux of the difficulty of ensuring the effectiveness of R&D tax support policies lies in their "One fits all" implementation standards.In addition,the unprecedented level of policy support for corporate innovation is also the root cause of the difficulty of improving policy effectiveness.Rather than failing to improve the ability of enterprises to innovate,government policies with less precision have exacerbated the plight of inefficient resource allocation.So is there an optimal R&D taxation incentive that makes the allocation of government taxes the most efficient?Finding the optimal incentive for research and development tax-type preferential policies will not only help the government understand the actual research and development needs of enterprises,but also clarify the boundary between the government and the market mechanism.This article focuses on the optimal incentive for research and development tax-type preferential policies.The main reasons for this are two points.First,theoretically,it focuses on the optimal research and development subsidies,while focusing on the optimal incentive for research and development taxtype preferential policies less,this is out of touch with the characteristics of China’s R&D support policy.China’s policy tools to encourage technological innovation have gradually shifted from direct government subsidies to indirect government subsidies,typically represented by R&D tax support.Taking research and development tax-type support policies with high inclusiveness and precision as the research object can better reflect the Chinese government’s policy orientation.It is difficult to accurately grasp the real needs of R&D funds of Chinese enterprises at this stage by studying only the optimal R&D direct subsidies and ignoring the implementation characteristics of China’s R&D tax policies;The threshold for policy implementation may affect the effect of policy implementation.There may be an inverted "U" relationship between government support and corporate innovation,that is,government support may have optimal support intensity.This is an academic negligence of research in the existing literature.Although the R&D tax support policy has gradually dominated,the effectiveness of the R&D tax support policy has been controversial.The reason is that there is a serious problem of information asymmetry between the government and enterprises.To facilitate the implementation of the policy,the government has implemented a "one size fits all" policy.It is this "one-size-fits-all" standard that will cause the government’s allocation of public funds to be inefficient,and will even induce companies to cross the policy threshold to obtain huge tax reductions and exemptions through financial fraud.In fact,due to the uneven level of innovation of Chinese enterprises and the time-varying risk of R&D,the “one-size-fits-all” policy implementation standard will instead bring about a series of problems such as mismatch between government expenditure and corporate R&D funding requirements,deviations from policy expectations and actualities.Therefore,the empirical calculation of the optimal support for R&D tax policies can not only help the government understand the actual R&D funding requirements of enterprises,but also effectively improve the efficiency of government funds.In view of the above research academic negligence and the actual need for policy optimization,this article attempts to use the optimal intensity of tax incentives to encourage scientific and technological innovation as the main line of research,taking two typical R&D tax support policies in China(the R&D expense deduction policy and the 15% tax rate for high-tech companies)as a research object,theoretically research the optimal R&D tax-type preferential policies,and further use historical tax reduction data to empirically measure the optimal support for China’s R&D tax-type preferential policies.The content is mainly reflected in the following two aspects: First,What is the optimal tax incentive policy? What is its optimal standard? Second,considering the complexity of China’s R&D tax-type support policies,if two typical R&D tax-type support policies in China are taken as the research object,is there an over-support phenomenon in these two types of R&D tax-type support policies?The answers to these questions require a more systematic economic analysis.This article restricts scientific and technological innovation to corporate R&D activities,and uses two typical R&D tax-type support policies in China as research objects.In theoretical analysis,this article analyzes the optimal incentive for R&D tax policies from both micro and macro perspectives.Specifically,at the micro level,Considering that corporate income tax does not have a direct effect on corporate R&D expenditures,this paper only introduces the R&D cost deduction variable into the micro-classical AJ R&D game model,and tries to find the optimal incentive for the R&D deduction policy with the benefit maximization standard.At the macro level,this article applies R&D cost The additional deduction variable and the 15% tax rate-type preferential variable for high-tech enterprises are also introduced into a simple endogenous economic growth model,and an attempt is made to find the optimal 15% tax-type rate and R&D deduct credit for high-tech enterprises based on the maximization of welfare and economic growth criteria.In terms of empirical research,based on the empirical idea of "tax reduction-incentives-non-linear incentives",based on the use of fixed effects method to empirically test the tax reduction and incentive effects of the R&D cost plus deduction policy and 15% tax rate preferential policies for high-tech enterprises,This paper also uses the threshold model proposed by Hansen to empirically test the non-linear incentive effects of two typical R&D tax-type policies on corporate R&D expenditures,and further calculates the optimal support intensity,and then make robustness test by replacing the dependent and threshold variables.After theoretical derivation and empirical analysis,this article draws the following conclusions:First,in the three types of R&D game models,there is an inverted “U” relationship between the R&D deduction policy incentive variable 6)and social welfare ,which means that from the perspective of welfare maximization,the government has the best R&D deduction policy incentive for corporate R&D activities.Second,the optimal R&D deduction policy incentive variable 6)decreases sequential in the three types of R&D game models with increasing cooperation levels.The explanation for this phenomenon is that the R&D cooperation between enterprises is conducive to improving the efficiency of the use of R&D funds to a certain extent,and the overall social welfare and fund allocation efficiency have been improved,so the government’s incentive has been relatively small.Second,in the macro-endogenous economic growth model,the numerical results show that there is an inverted “U” relationship between the high-tech enterprise income tax rate and economic growth rate ,also the social welfare U variables,which means that based on maximizing economic growth and the social welfare maximization as the standard,the high-tech enterprise income tax rate has an optimal value.In addition,this article also finds there is an inverted “U” relationship between the R&D deduction factor 6)and economic growth rate ,also the social welfare U variables,which also means that based on the same standards,the R&D deduction policy has the optimal incentive.Third,empirical results show that although the R&D deduction policy and the 15% tax rate preferential policies for high-tech enterprises can significantly reduce corporate tax burdens and encourage enterprises to increase research and development expenditures,there is still an over-support phenomenon.The empirical results show that the optimal support for the R&D deduction policy is 0.0254,which means that the R&D deduction policy should grant a reduction or exemption of 0.0254 for R&D expenditure of enterprises.The optimal support for the 15% tax rate preferential policy for high-tech enterprises is 0.0002,that is,the optimal incentive for this policy is 0.0002 of sales income. |
PDF Full Text Request