Key Findings The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lowered the top integrated tax rate on corporate income distributed as dividends from 56.33 percent in 2017 to 47.47 percent in 2020; the OECD average is 41.6 percent. Joe Biden’s proposal to increase the corporate income tax rate and to tax long-term capital gains and qualified dividends at […]
Table of Contents Key Findings Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia had notable tax changes take effect. Arkansas and Iowa reduced their corporate income tax rates and made other substantive changes to their corporate income tax base. Arizona and New Mexico increased their top marginal individual income tax rates by adding another bracket. Arkansas […]
Key Findings In 2020, 10 countries made changes to their statutory corporate income tax rates. One country—Micronesia—increased its top corporate tax rate, while nine countries—Armenia, Belgium, Colombia, France, French Polynesia, Greenland, Monaco, Togo, and Zimbabwe—reduced their corporate tax rates. Comoros (50 percent), Puerto Rico (37.5 percent), and Suriname (36 percent) are the countries with the highest […]
Poland and Estonia have dramatically different tax systems. While Estonia has earned the top rank in our International Tax Competitiveness Index for seven years running, Poland consistently ranks toward the bottom of the Index. This year Poland ranks 34th out of 36 countries. While consumption and property tax policies are key contributors to this low […]
Among President-elect Joe Biden’s proposals is increasing taxes on corporate income, both at the entity level and at the shareholder level. If enacted, Biden’s plan would reduce after-tax income for corporations and shareholders across the income distribution, reduce economic growth by over 1.5 percent, and eliminate more than half-a-million jobs. Increasing taxes on corporate income […]
The Organisation for Co-operation and Economic Development (OECD) has compiled tax revenue data for countries around the world—including 30 African countries, where tax revenue as a percent of GDP is on average lower than in other regions. On average, this tax-to-GDP ratio for those 30 countries was 16.5 percent, compared to the OECD average of 34.3 percent and […]
In the coming weeks, we will break down our recently released 2021 State Business Tax Climate Index with maps illustrating each of the five major components of the Index: corporate, individual, sales, property, and unemployment insurance taxes. Today we look at states’ rankings on the corporate tax component, which accounts for 20.8 percent of each state’s overall rank. The corporate tax […]
Taxes paid by corporations and income inequality are both topics of national attention, particularly during the ongoing 2020 presidential campaign. Increasing the corporate tax rate is often offered as a solution to income inequality because higher-income individuals tend to own more corporate shares than others and may bear the burden of a tax increase on […]
Earlier this week we published our annual State Business Tax Climate Index, which measures tax structure. It’s an extremely valuable diagnostic tool, enabling readers to compare states’ tax structures across more than 120 variables. Unlike most studies of state taxes, it is focused on the how more than the how much, in recognition of the […]
October 2020 Update: Since our September analysis of the Biden plan, we have included the campaign proposal to expand the estate and gift tax by reducing the exemption amount to $3.5 million and increasing the top rate for the estate tax to 45 percent, which has impacted our economic, revenue, and distributional estimates. We have also […]