Financial disincentives to formal employment and tax-benefit systems in Latin America

Authors

Holguer Xavier Jara Tamayo, María Cecilia Deza Delgado, Nicolás Oliva, Javier Torres

Publication Date

Feb 2023

Summary

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it provides a comprehensive assessment of the financial disincentives to enter formal employment implied by the design of the tax-benefit system in five Latin American countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. Then, it analyzes the extent to which formalizing informal workers would contribute to increase fiscal capacity in the region. The results show a wide variation in financial disincentives to enter formal employment, with formalization tax rates ranging between 8.5 percent in Venezuela and 42 percent in Colombia. Formalization tax rates are particularly high for self-employed informal workers, and mainly driven by the high costs associated with social insurance contributions. The analysis further shows that potential entries to formal employment would raise tax revenue in all countries, but mainly through the effect of increased social insurance contributions, whereas personal income tax revenue would have a marginal contribution, except in Bolivia and Venezuela. Interestingly, potential formalization of informal workers with the highest probability of being formal would allow capturing a substantial share of the additional tax revenue lost due to informality.

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 30 , p.69 -113

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10797-021-09724-8

Publication type

Journal Article

Research area

Tax and benefit systems

Notes

Open Access; This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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