اثرات و مکانیسم تاثیر اصلاح مالیاتی منابع چین : یک چشم انداز منطقه ای

China's resource tax reform, beginning with Xinjiang as a pilot area in June 2010, marked a new stage in the progression of China's resource tax system. Based on the 2007 social accounting matrix (SAM) for Xinjiang, constructed by ourselves, this paper takes a regional perspective on China's resource tax reform to quantitatively calculate its degree of influence and qualitatively analyze its mechanism of influence by adopting an energy computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and a SAM price model. The results show that the main significance of the reform lies in bolstering local government finances rather than energy conservation or carbon reduction. This is because revenue will be transferred from resource enterprises and the central government to the local government, while simultaneously the low tax rate, narrow tax scope and unreasonable price mechanism will combine to prevent the reform from reaching its environmental goals. Promoting resource price mechanism reform and deepening resource tax reform will be two key elements of China's future energy strategies. Because resource enterprises will bear the increased burden caused by the reform, the degree of sectoral price increases will be limited; therefore, the fear that resource tax reform will push up inflation is unnecessary and should not be a barrier to reform.

China's resource tax system has been improving gradually over the past thirty years. In 1984, to adjust differential income derived from resources, China began collecting resource taxes by volume on crude oil, natural gas, coal, metal ore and non-metal ore products. Ten years later, the scope of resource taxation was expanded to all mineral resources. This resource tax system was applied for more than a decade without fundamental change until June 2010, when the State Administration of Taxation and the Ministry of Finance jointly issued the “Provisions on Several Issues Concerning the Reform of Resource Tax on Crude Oil and Natural Gas in Xinjiang”. It indicated that China's resource tax reform would start with Xinjiang as a pilot area. Why did China first reform resource taxes in Xinjiang rather than in other provinces? First, it is one of a series of central government support policies to promote the development of Xinjiang's economy (Xian, 2010). Second, as an important part of China's energy base (Qian et al., 2012), Xinjiang has conditions that are suitable for reform. According to its provisions, Xinjiang's resource tax reform involves crude oil and natural gas, and the resource tax will be levied based on price instead of on production volume, with a tax rate of 5%. In December 2010, the resource tax reform was extended to twelve western provinces. In November 2011, China extended the regional resource tax on domestic sales of crude oil and natural gas to the whole country, increased the tax rate to 5–10%, and widened the tax to include coking coal and rare earths. The reform has great significance and indicates that China's resource tax system is entering a new stage. First, the resource tax base is much more reasonable. The traditional volume-based resource tax encourages resource companies to develop and utilize high-quality mineral resources and quite low-grade resources, which results in a waste of state-owned mineral resources (Xu and Wu, 2011 and Zhang and Zhou, 2007). Additionally, the volume-based resource tax cannot reflect resource price changes (Sun, 2007), neglecting the relationship between resource taxes and price. Second, the resource tax rate is increased. The traditional low rate of resource taxation cannot reflect the real value of resources, leading to overexploitation and depletion of natural resources (Cao et al., 2011) and contributing little to local public finances (Zhang, 2006). Therefore, it is of great importance to analyze the economic and environmental effects of resource tax reform. The Chinese government said the reform was mainly for the purpose of resource conservation and environmental damage reduction. For example, on July 19, 2011, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao chaired a leading group conference on the national response to climate change focused on working toward energy savings and emission reductions, and the conference noted that promoting the reform of resource and environmental taxes would contribute to the improvement of the permanent mechanism for energy savings and emission reductions. Previous research generally also concluded that resource tax reform contributes to energy saving and emission reduction (Barker et al., 1993, Berkhout et al., 2004, Guo et al., 2011, Lin and He, 2008, Peretto, 2009, Tarek, 2007, Wei, 2009 and Wissema and Dellink, 2007). However, there are few quantitative calculations of the energy conservation and emission reduction effects of China's resource tax reform, especially from the provincial level. In addition, these studies overlook the impact of China's energy price mechanism, which may influence the environmental effects of resource tax reform. It is widely believed that the reform will also cause a larger portion of resource companies' profits to flow to the public finances of local governments. Previous studies mainly analyzed the impacts of resource tax reform from a national perspective (Guo et al., 2011, Lin and He, 2008 and Wei, 2009) and failed to present the impact of the reform on local revenue, which has great significance especially for western provinces. With Xinjiang as an example, we developed a regional social accounting matrix (SAM) model and established an energy computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to quantitatively simulate the economic and environmental effects of resource tax reform from a regional perspective. During the reform process, the main concern was that the reform may push up inflation (Zhu, 2011). However, the existing literature on China's resource tax reform (Cao et al., 2011, Guo et al., 2011, Lin and He, 2008, Wei, 2009, Xu, 2011 and Xu and Wu, 2011) failed to provide a detailed analysis of the impact of resource tax reform on sectoral price levels or of the tax burden caused by the reform. As an effective supplement to CGE analysis, price multiplier and structural path analysis were adopted in this paper to analyze the resource influence mechanism and discuss why certain sectors will bear the increased tax burden caused by the reform. The simulation scenarios are determined according to the actual situation and future trend of the resource tax system. First, the tax rate we set is 5–20%, which is larger than the present tax rate (5–10%). China's Ministry of Finance has indicated that the resource tax reforms would be further deepened when appropriate and that the resource tax rate would be further increased, considering that a tax rate between 5 and 10% was still much lower than that of developed countries. For instance, the resource tax rate of Australia reaches as high as 30%. The existing literature also agrees that the resource tax rate will be further increased. For example, the highest tax rate reaches as high as 50% in the research of Wei (2009). Thus, we believe that it is possible that the resource tax rate could be 20% as the reform continues. Second, the resource tax items we analyze are not only crude oil and natural gas but also coal. In September 2012, Minister of Finance Xie Xuren said that the scope of the reform will be further widened, especially the tax on coal, which is the main source of energy for China. At present, only coking coal is in the scope of reform, but it is widely believed that coal resource tax reform will be implemented in the future. For example, Guo et al. (2011) calculate the effects of different rates of ad valorem taxes for coal. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the construction and structure of Xinjiang's SAM of 2007, along with data on energy consumption and carbon emissions. Section 3 mainly describes the simulation models. Simulation results and discussions are given in Section 4, followed by main conclusions and policy implications in Section 5.

In June 2010, China began resource tax reform with a pilot program in Xinjiang. This paper discusses the three fundamental issues of China's resource tax reform from a regional perspective: promoting energy conservation and carbon reduction, bolstering local government revenue, and increasing inflationary pressures. First, the Xinjiang energy CGE model is developed in this paper to quantitatively calculate the degree of economic and environmental influence of the reform; second, a SAM price model, as a supplement to the CGE analysis, is adopted to qualitatively analyze the resource price transmission mechanism. The main conclusions are as follows: 1) Contrary to expectations, applying Xinjiang's current resource tax reform merely to oil and gas contributes little to energy conservation and emission reduction and even exacerbates the unreasonable energy structure. Even if the reform is extended to coal with a higher tax rate, the environmental effects are still limited. The low resource tax rate, narrow resource tax scope and unreasonable resource price mechanism combine to determine that the reform fails to reach the expected environmental goals. However, merely increasing the tax rate and extending the tax scope are not enough, and resource price mechanism reform is the key to address this problem. China should adjust the administered resource price mechanism and liberalize resource prices to a larger degree. 2) The original fiscal goal of resource tax reform to bolster local government finances is achieved. The reform will result in a redistribution of revenue among the local government, the central government, and monopolistic resource enterprises. Revenue will be transferred from resource enterprises and the central government to the local government. In addition, resource taxes with a higher tax rate and a larger tax scope will accentuate the revenue redistribution effects of resource taxes, and the fiscal effects of the reform will be much more obvious. China's resource tax reform should be further promoted and deepened to further transform Xinjiang' resource advantages to economic and financial advantages. 3) The previous concern that resource tax reform will increase inflation is unnecessary. The administered price mechanism determines that current oil and gas resource tax reform has no direct impact on sectoral price levels; PetroChina and Sinopec will bear the increased burden caused by the reform. The imperfect coal-electricity price linkage mechanism means that expanding resource tax reform to coal with a higher tax rate still will not impact sectoral price levels as seriously as expected, and the tax burden of thermal power enterprises, which play an important role in the coal price transmission paths, will increase. It is unnecessary to fear that current resource tax reform will increase inflation, which should not, therefore, be a barrier to China's resource tax reform.