¿Cuánto tributan efectivamente el consumo, el trabajo y el capital en Colombia?

Abstract

Knowing how much consumers, workers and owners of capital are effectively taxed is important to understand the impact of taxes on their decisions, production costs, investment, the cycle and economic growth and the distribution of the tax burden. At the same time, it is critical for the study of optimal taxation and the decision making of tax policy. The objective of the paper is to calculate, for Colombia, the average gross and net effective tax rates on consumption and income of the factors of production, labor and capital, in the period between 1994 and 2016. In addition, in order to obtain a complete measure of the total effective tax burden of the country, the rate is also estimated on the rest of taxes, technically not classified in the previous categories. The general conclusion is that taxes in Colombia are not as high as is claimed, neither as low nor as well distributed as desired. The policy implications derived from the results indicate that fiscal authorities must be careful when making tax policy decisions based on nominal rates, eliminate tax benefits that do not have technical support, strengthen instruments to avoid evasion and eliminate tax evasion, balance tax burdens and, last but not least, if they eliminated payroll contributions, the tax burden on labor would be reduced by 13%. Moreover, if the contributions to social security were reduced, the relief would be even greater.