Analysis of Value Added Tax Revenues in the Czech Republic: a Case Study

The analysis of data from the Czech Republic between 1993 and 2013 assesses how VAT rate changes impact VAT revenues of respective national budgets. The core focus of the paper is the application of the Laffer curve on value added tax. Using a regression analysis we analyze how VAT revenue contributions to the budget are impacted by GDP. The results of our econometric model impaly that a 1% GDP increase leads to a 0.987% increase in VAT revenues to the budget. We find, by cleansing the VAT revenue data of inflationary and GDP effects, that the highest income generating VAT rates are 23% standard and 5% reduced. Both rates were, however, in effect as a result of VAT introductions in the Czech Republic, which might lead to a significant bias in our analysis. We present a chart of a time series of VAT revenues adjusted for inflationary and GDP effects which shows that VAT revenues decrease in the period from 1993 to 1998 after which they stabilize at around CZK 40bn until 2013. From that we infer that, over time, VAT payers have learned how to avoid the tax. We also present three hypotheses in our work; we find that an increase in the reduced VAT rate always brings additional revenues to the budget, that standard VAT rate changes impact revenues in the same direction in only 3 out of 5 cases, and that standard VAT rate changes are a leading variable for household consumption, the trend of which is always less volatile as the lagging variable. The above applies for the reduced VAT rate in just one of four cases.