Effective corporate income taxation and its effect on capital accumulation: cross-country evidence

Abstract It is debated to what extent corporate taxation discourages capital formation, and the related empirical cross-country evidence is inconclusive. This paper provides new insights into this matter for a large sample of developed and developing countries. In the first step, national accounts data is used to calculate backward-looking effective corporate income tax rates (ECTR) for 77 countries during 1995–2018. In the second step, dynamic panel data regressions are used to estimate the effect of ECTR on aggregate corporate investment. The main findings of this exercise are that (i) statutory corporate income tax rates (SCTR), on average, are twice as high as ECTR, (ii) average ECTR has been relatively stable but show distinct dynamics across countries and (iii) no significant negative relationship exists between ECTR and investment. The latter finding is robust to different specifications and samples and when publicly available SCTR or forward-looking effective tax rate measures are used as alternative tax rate proxies.