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Record W3122071248

Modernizing Business Taxation

2016· article· en· W3122071248 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueC.D. Howe Institute Commentary · 2016
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCanadian Policy and Governance
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDividend taxTaxable incomeTax avoidanceDouble taxationInternational taxationState income taxBusinessCorporate taxIndirect taxTax reformIncome taxGross incomeValue-added taxEconomicsLabour economicsFinanceMonetary economicsPublic economicsAccounting
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Canadian corporate income tax system is subject to a number of problems that call for fundamental reforms, starting with rethinking the main role of the system. The corporate tax is mainly designed to serve as a withholding device for the personal income tax. It prevents shareholders from sheltering corporate-source earnings from the personal income tax by taxing those earnings at source. Integration of the corporate income tax and of the personal income tax, through the dividend-tax credit and the preferential treatment of capital gains, mitigates the potential for doubletaxation. We argue that exposure to international capital markets, which implies that the incidence of the corporate tax is largely shifted to labour, and the fact that most capital income can be sheltered from the personal income tax undermine the withholding role of the corporate tax and make integration provisions unnecessary. The current system also leads to distortions in firms’ investment decisions, financing decisions, risk-taking and innovation efforts, and decisions about where to locate business activities and where to report profits. Tax competition and international profit-shifting are also putting downward pressure on tax rates. This Commentary examines these problems and formulates a number of recommendations for reform. The main one involves changing the tax base from shareholder income to above-normal profits, or rents. This could be done with relatively little disruption of the current system by adopting the allowance for corporate equity (ACE) tax system which allows firms to deduct from taxable income the cost of equity financing, in addition to deducting interest on debt. Ideally, this tax base would apply to both incorporated and unincorporated businesses. Adopting the ACE would narrow the tax base, although the potential loss in revenue would be entirely compensated by eliminating the dividend-tax credit and the partial taxexemption of capital gains, as we argue should be done. Our proposed reforms include a number of other elements. First, the territorial approach for taxing international active business income should apply. Second, firms should be allowed to carry forward and backward tax losses at the risk-free interest rate, which would encourage risk-taking and innovation. Third, we recommend maintaining the small business deduction to compensate for the non-refundability of losses, which are more prevalent among small businesses. However, eligibility should be determined on the basis of a lifetime threshold rather than an annual one. Finally, in order to promote innovation, introducing a preferential tax rate for patent income, as well as extending flow-through share financing to investment in small innovative firms, should be considered.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.698
Threshold uncertainty score0.914

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.037
GPT teacher head0.290
Teacher spread0.253 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it