Tax Incidence of Philippine Tax Reform: Poverty and Distributional Effect

The purpose of the study is to determine the poverty and distributional effects of the implementation of Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion Law. The Computable General Equilibrium-Top Down Behavioral Microsimulation was used to obtain the effects of the tax reform on macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. Moreover, the Poverty Gap Index, Squared Poverty Gap Index, Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke Measures of Poverty, and Sen-Shorrocks-Thon Index were used to measure the poverty effect of the tax reform. Meanwhile, the Gini Coefficient and SST Gini Coefficient Index were used to measure the distributional effect of the tax reform. The results show that the implementation of the tax reform has resulted in a significant increase in household income and disposable income. Region IV has the highest estimated increase in household income. Meanwhile, Region IV remained to have the lowest household income. Further, the findings of this study suggest that the tax reform resulted in a significant decrease in the magnitude of poor and the number of poor in the Philippines. However, the result of the study also suggests that the effect of tax reform manifests no differences in terms of the poverty gap measured through the Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke poverty index due.