The Taxation of Income from Capital: A Comparative Study of the U.S., U.K., Sweden and West Germany--Comparisons of Effective Tax Rates--

Abstract

This working paper presents Chapter 7 of a book to be published for the National Bureau of Economic Research by the University of Chicago Press. The point of the book is to compare taxes on income from capital in four countries,accounting for corporate, personal, and property taxes, and including national,regional, and local level taxes. We describe statutory tax rates and other tax rules in each country and calculate overall effective marginal tax ratesfor different combinations of asset, industry, source of finance, and ownership categories.This chapter compares effective tax rates in the four countries for different assets, industries, sources of finance, and ownership categories.Differences in overall effective tax rates among countries are attributed to differences in rates of inflation, actual depreciation,tax parameters, or differences in the amount of capital in each combination.For each country,we plot the effect of inflation on overall tax rates, and we plot the distribution of different effective tax rates at a given rate of inflation. We further investigate the sensitivity of results to assumptions about inflation and interest rates.