우리나라의 租稅負擔에 관한 考察

Tax Burden of Indirect Taxation in Korea

Indeed, for a development country it is believed to be a positive advantage to use the means of indirect taxation more extensively, for raising more revenue. There is, however, a wide spread opinion that more extensive use of indirect taxes would increase inequity of tax burden, because of regressive nature of indirect taxes. Dr. Musgrave, however, denied such a viewpoint in his recommendation to Korean government, prepared for exploring "Revenue Policy for Korea's Economic Development," in 1965, claiming that the extension of commodity taxation should strengthen rather than weaken the equity of the tax structure. In this paper, it is undertaken to examine whether the burden of indirect taxes is regressive or progressive, with respect to commodity taxes, liquor taxes and cigarrette taxes (monopoly profit) levied in Korea, so as to prove or disprove the proposition of Dr. Musgrave. I. Assumptions and Method Assumptions According to the general approach in computing tax burdens by income classes, the family budget data are used under the following assumptions: first, the burden of indirect taxes is fully shifted to final consumers; second, the burden of indirect taxes levied on the specific taxable goods is proportional to the sum of family expenditure on the said goods; third, consumer does not change his consumption behavior on account of tax burden, nor he is influenced by the money illusion. Besides, the computation of the tax burden in this paper has the following restrictions in relation to the data used and the result obtained. First, the computation of the tax burden was limited only three internal consumption taxes such as the commodity tax, the liquor tax and the cigarette tax, which was estimated from the monopoly profit, collected and acquired in FY 1965. Second, the family budget data used in computing the tax burden are identical with those collected regularly by the Research and Statistics Bureau of the Economic Planning Board(EPB) from 1,720 sample households in 30 cities. Therefore, the tax burden computed represents that of urban area only. The EPB family budget data of the highest income class of a monthly average income of \14,000, however, are reclassified into three classes of which the highest one is the income class of more than \30,000. Third, In computing the tax burden the family expenditure of the fourth quarter of FY 1965 was extended to the whole years on account of limitation of data. The result computed, therefore, has the upward bias owing to the seasonal changes. Method Under the assumption that the money burden of selected taxes by the family are proportional to the family expenditure for the taxed goods, the money burden of the specific taxes by income class was computed from the data of family expenditure on each tax item. However, in computing the amount of tax paid by families the sale margin of 25%, which was estimated by the Bank of Korea, was deducted from the amount of expenditure on each tax item. In case of liquor tax, however, the sale margin of 11%-12% was used, and in the case of cigarette tax, 9%. It is, therefore, inevitable to rule out the downward or upward bias of computed tax burden on account of the difference of sale margin on each taxable item. II. Pattern of Family Income and Expenditure Family income and expenditure in 1965 In 1965 urban wage earner households earned \8,448 in a month on the average by whole income classes. It, however, ranges from \1,652 on income class below \2,000 to \34,729 on income class more than \30,000. On the other hand, average family expenditure of the urban wage earner household reached \8,626 in a month by whole families of wage earner, and it ranges from \2,010 on income class below \2,000 to \33,309 on income class more than \30,000. So far as the consumption expenditure of wage earner's household concerned, the size of expenditure is smaller than the total expenditure of households, in general, it exceeds the le