Research Progress on Optimal Tax from a Spatial Perspective
Promoting the orderly flow and optimal allocation of factors among regions is an important focus point for realizing China's high-quality economic development,and fiscal policy is an important means for promoting the bal-ance and optimization of factor allocation.With the advancement of technology and the acceleration of factor mobility,it is increasingly important to study tax issues from the spatial perspective,and research related to optimal tax from the spa-tial perspective is becoming increasingly abundant.This article summarizes research on optimal tax from a spatial perspec-tive in three aspects:spatial economy and optimal taxation,the influencing factors of spatial optimal tax,and the welfare effects of spatial optimal tax,thus providing experience and theoretical references for the new round of tax reform in the context of the construction of the national unified market.To begin with,this article briefly reviews the research context of the spatial economy to more clearly grasp the ideo-logical origin of research on the spatial economy and clarify the core issues of research on the spatial economy.In the 1990s,the new economic geography incorporated spatial factors into the framework of general equilibrium analysis,thus bringing spatial issues into the research horizons of mainstream economics.Research on spatial economy expands the hori-zons of optimal tax theory and empirical research and prompts foreign scholars to explore the impact of tax policy on popu-lation mobility,enterprise location choice,industrial distribution,economic agglomeration,and city scale from spatial perspectives.Subsequently,this article analyzes the influencing factors of optimal tax design from the spatial perspective in terms of factor flows,trade links,and tax competition.It is found that the agglomeration effect and human capital spillover ef-fect brought by the flow of labor and capital factors promote the economic development of cities,but disorderly resource flow causes spatial inefficiency.To avoid resource mismatch and loss of productivity caused by disorderly capital flow,the government needs to formulate a reasonable tax policy to coordinate and guide it.The optimal tax policy depends on trade costs,which can either prompt local governments to reduce tax rates to enhance the attractiveness of regional fac-tors or induce local governments to expand the scale of fiscal expenditure to hedge against the external dangers of trade.Reasonable tax competition can improve economic efficiency and increase aggregate welfare,but excessive tax competi-tion undermines economic efficiency,and the Nash equilibrium of horizontal tax competition tends to keep tax rates in all places below the optimal level.Further,this article summarizes research on the theoretical mechanism,measurement and evaluation of tax welfare effect and optimal tax welfare effect.The results show that the spatial optimal tax should coordinate the interests of differ-ent groups through appropriate tax system design to maximize the welfare of the whole society based on geographic char-acteristics.Based on the idea of the utility theory,scholars measure the welfare effect of optimal tax from the spatial per-spective by constructing local equilibrium or general equilibrium models.The optimal tax policy from the spatial perspec-tive aims to improve the efficiency of resource allocation,and it has been found that the spatial optimal tax optimizes pro-duction and consumption by regulating factor flows between different regions,maximizing consumers'utility and produc-ers'profits,balancing the government's revenues and expenditures,and ultimately maximizing social welfare.Finally,this article points out the future research direction of optimal tax from the spatial perspective in the context of the national unified market.As a result of the spatial imbalance in the distribution of resources and economic activities among China's regions,the spatial allocation of factors has not been able to reach an optimal level.The fiscal decentraliza-tion under the tax system reform,while mobilizing the enthusiasm of local governments,has exacerbated the imbalance of the economic structure and affected the role of the market in the allocation of resources.Therefore,future research can focus on the improvement of the regional investment environment,fiscal balance,tax subsidies considering geographical characteristics,the trade-off between the improvement of regional welfare and the overall welfare,and the design of opti-mal real estate tax by combining with national realities,thus providing more theoretical references and experience for the new round of China's fiscal and taxation system reform.
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维普
