The Role of Fiscal Policy in Ensuring Inclusive Economic Growth in the Republic of Armenia in the Context of the Sustainable Development Goals

The article discusses the issues of selecting fiscal policy instruments and estimating the optimal tax burden in the context of ensuring inclusive economic growth. This article is based on the implementation of the theoretical requirement of combining the principles of fairness and efficiency in optimal tax policy. The main conceptual starting point of this analysis is that the tax burden of a state should stem from two main pillars: the first is macro-fundamental factors, which often consider fiscal policy exclusively from the perspective of meeting the state's spending needs and adequately responding to economic cycles, and the second pillar is the set of indicators related to social and institutional processes that characterize the sustainable development of the economy. In order to study the problem of assessing the optimal tax burden in the context of sustainable development, a panel regression model was calculated for 193 low-, middle-, and high-income countries with a time sample of 2002-2022. This made it possible to link the tax burden - taxes/GDP - with the macroeconomic fundamentals of the economy, as well as a number of indicators characterizing sustainable development. The study found that the actual and optimal levels of tax burden for countries by income group are directly proportional to their levels of development. As for the difference between the optimal and actual tax burden in dynamics, according to the results of the study, in low-income countries the optimal level is constantly lower than the actual level during the observed period, which is most likely due to the predominance of expenditure needs in these countries, which, ultimately, has a restraining effect on economic processes.