| China’s current economic growth mode causes a double challenge of severe employment situation and environmental crisis. Traditional methods such as relying on economic growth to promote employment and solely "add" green tax to deal with pollution are difficult to solve this double-problem. On one hand, we must acknowledge the great efforts of our country in dealing with employment and environmental challenges, but on the other hand, employment and environmental situation has not been improved obviously. So we have to think about the essential reasons behind all the problems and try to find out the factors which have negative impacts on employment and environmental situation from the social and economic system. Among them, taxation can strongly affect the market price system and the allocation of resources. Well-designed tax structure will help increase employment, improve the environment and make economic operation generate environmental benefits automatically. Therefore, it is very important to clarify whether there exits some negative factors in current tax structure.This essay reviews the basic theories of green taxes, related researches and practices in China as well as the existing literature on the differences of tax burden between industries. And based on this, analyzes the distorting factors in our tax structure which are not conducive to employment and environment protection from the following aspects.Firstly, based on the literature review, international comparison and data analysis, this essay holds that the social insurance fee in China has the basic characteristics of tax. It is one kind of tax burden on taxpayers and an important factor affecting the level of tax burden and tax structure. However, in China, at present the revenue of social insurance fee is not included in tax revenue, which will distort the overall tax structure and tax burden on different production factors. And social insurance fee is levying on the labor factors, which would contribute a lot to this essay’s result. Therefore, in the empirical research of the tax burden on enterprises, social insurance fee is regarded as one kind of enterprise tax burden.Secondly, this essay conducts an empirical study of industrial enterprise tax burden, particularly concerned about the tax burden of the labor-intensive industries and "High Pollution, High Energy and Resource Consumption" Industries which are closely related to employment and environmental problems. The essay takes the data of 1251 China’s industrial listed enterprises in 2011 as sample to conduct classification comparison, multiple linear regression and quintile regression analysis. The results show that:the overall tax burden of China’s labor-intensive industries is much higher than non-labor-intensive industries while the overall tax burden of "high pollution, high energy and resource consumption" industries is lower than the other ones; Enterprises’ total tax burden is significantly positively correlated with labor-intensity and changes of labor-intensity will have greater impact on enterprises with higher tax burden, which means distorting factors bad for employment and environment do exist in current tax structure of China.Based on this, this essay finally puts forward some policy improvement directions such as tax policy should encourage the development of labor intensive company; tax policy adjustments should always adhere to the principle of neutrality; tax policy should promote broader green progress. |
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