نقطه ضعف وظیفه واردات و تخفیف مالیات بر ارزش افزوده سیاست های چین: تجزیه و تحلیل تعادل عمومی

China's duty drawbacks and value-added tax rebates play important roles in promoting exports. Simulations from a CGE model, characterized by a dual production (domestic sales and export processing) and dual import structure (imports used in export processing and for other purposes), confirm our theoretical results on China's exports that (a) such policies are generally export promoting; (b) a small part of the export expansion comes at the expense of a slight decline of the domestic activity through factor re-allocation and input substitution, whereas a larger portion of the expansion is attributed to cheaper access to foreign inputs; (c) export processors use more imported inputs and less domestic inputs; and (d) export intensive sectors are positively affected by these policies, whereas traditional agriculture sector is impacted adversely. These policies generate welfare gains for China.

The policies of import duty drawbacks and value-added tax (VAT) rebates have played important roles in promoting China's exports in the last two decades. Duty drawbacks and VAT rebates are respectively the reductions in tariffs and domestic taxes on imported inputs used for export processing.1 For example, in 1998, a 17% tariff was imposed on the imports of machinery and an additional 17% domestic tax was levied on its value-added in production. Both taxes are rebated when the machinery is used for export processing.2 As these two policies discriminate against imported inputs used in goods sold domestically, they certainly create incentives for firms to sell products abroad. How effective are duty drawbacks and tax rebates in promoting exports? Using China's aggregate data, Chao, Chou and Yu (2001) showed that duty drawbacks expand the exportable and the intermediate-good sectors. However, their study does not provide detailed sectoral responses by products to duty drawbacks. To study this issue, this paper generalizes the model of Chao et al. for theoretical considerations and then modifies a standard computable general-equilibrium (CGE) model for illustrating the quantitative effects of the policies. As duty drawbacks and tax rebates apply to China's processing exports, it is necessary to separate export processing from domestic sales. Utilizing this modified model, we conduct two sets of counterfactual simulations to illustrate the sectoral and economy-wide effects of these two policies for the Chinese economy. Applications of CGE models on tax and trade issues can be found in Dixon, Parmenter, Sutton and Vincent (1982), Shoven and Whalley (1984), Srinivasan and Whalley (1986) and Robinson (1988). CGE models have also been used in analyzing trade and other issues in China. For example, Wang and Zhai (1998) considered the distributional effects of trade liberalization and tax policies of China. Xu and Chang (2000) studied the employment effect of tariff reductions in China. Wang (2003) evaluated the impact of China's WTO membership and a “Greater China” free trade area on the economic relationship across the Taiwan Strait. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 considers theoretical aspects of the tax rebate policy. Section 3 presents a CGE model, while Section 4 carries out policy simulations. Section 5 concludes the paper.

We have used a general equilibrium model to illustrate the output and welfare effects of duty-drawbacks and VAT rebates, respectively. The theoretical propositions are substantiated with simulations using a modified GTAP model, which is characterized by dual production (domestic production and export processing) and dual import structure (imports for domestic uses and for export processing) for the Chinese economy. We have obtained several results by conducting two sets of simulations. First, these policies are generally export promoting. Second, a small part of export expansion comes at the expense of a slight decline of domestic production through factor re-allocation and input substitution, whereas a large part can be attributed to greater and cheaper access to foreign inputs. Third, substitution towards more imported inputs not only happens in export processing, but also in domestic activities although to a smaller degree. This is mainly due to competition for limited domestic products by consumers and industries. Fourth, sectoral results differ substantially. Electronics, motor vehicles and other transport equipment, chemical and plastic products, other manufacturing, textile and clothing benefit from the policy change, while agricultural and food products, as well as natural resources are sectors with little or even adverse impacts. These results are hardly surprising given the former are all major exports of China. Lastly, although our theoretical analysis on welfare is ambiguous, simulation results show that increasing the drawbacks and rebates does raise welfare. The negative terms-of-trade effect is also obtained from the simulations. Some caveats regarding the data used in the simulations need to be pointed out. The first is the lack of data on the cost structure of domestic production and export processing. To deal with this problem, we choose to re-calibrate their respective cost structures according to the value of their final output shares. It would be coincidental if this simplistic treatment reveals the actual cost shares of imported inputs in export processing activities. As such, the results obtained from the experiments should be treated as illustrative only, and any serious attempt to accurately capture the effects of the policies obviously needs to build on a better representation of the actual cost shares. Our second limitation is related to the assumption that the same initial tariff rates are imposed on imports used as inputs in producing exports and those used elsewhere. These initial rates are probably a weighted average of the rates applied on the two types of imports. When both types of tariff rates are included in a future version of the GTAP database, we can re-run the duty drawback experiments by raising the tariff rates on imported inputs. We then can look at how the statutory tariff rates would have restricted trade and how exports from China would have reacted to the tariff reductions.12