Do some firms pay more corporate taxes than others? If so, which types of firms benefit from a reduced tax burden, and how do they achieve this reduction? Are differences in tax rates due to the design of the tax system, to strategic tax planning or to differential enforcement? These questions matter for tax design and are difficult to answer in an empirically founded and comprehensive manner. We use administrative tax data in many countries to systematically calculate firm-level effective tax rates (ETRs) and study how ETRs vary across the firm size distribution. This note shows the results for the Dominican Republic, where the corporate statutory tax rate is 27% in 2015. We find that the ETR averages 16% across all firms, increases over the firm-size distribution, and decreases at the top for the largest firms.
Authors
Anne Brockmeyer
Anne is head of the tax and development group at IFS and an honorary faculty member at UCL. Her work focuses on tax policy in lower-income countries.
Pierre Bachas
Pierre is an IFS Research Fellow and an economist in the Macro and Growth Unit of the World Bank's Development Research Group.
Camille Semelet
Roel Dom
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