The Impacts of Two Tax Reforms on Inequality and Welfare in China

This paper takes stock of the existing literature on taxation and presents a framework to evaluate the impacts of tax policy reforms from the perspectives of progressivity and social welfare. It applies this framework to examine two tax reforms in China and finds that (i) the abolition of the regressive agricultural tax in 2005 has significantly improved the social welfare of rural residents; (ii) the increase in the income tax thresholds in 2011 increased progressivity but reduced the overall income tax share of total taxation. When the majority of the taxpayers are in the lower tax bracket, progressivity has little real impact in improving income distribution.