Does the Burden of Corporate Income Tax Borne By Labour Through Reduced Wage Rates or Labour Hours, Resulting in a Lower Cost of Labour to the Firm?

Shareholders ability to shift the burden of the tax to the consumer or labour depends largely on the mobility of capital. If the investor can move from the corporate sector into the non corporate sector, the laws of supply and demand will cause some of the burden of the corporate income tax to be borne by others. The aim of this paper is to find out whether the burden of the corporate income tax may be borne by labour through reduced wage rates or labour hours, resulting in a lower cost of labour to the firm,using ten (10) years financial data from ten firms listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange. The result provides evidence that part of the tax burden is shifted backwards to labour. Both the actual and adjusted data used in the model confirmed the alternate hypothesis. The result also demonstrated that a 1% increment in the corporate tax would result in 11% fall in the burden of the tax on labour.