Comparative Analysis Of Tax Policies Applicable In The New And Original Eu Member-States

The objective of this paper is to compare the tax policies of the twelve new countries of the European Union with those of the existing fifteen members. These countries have sometimes been criticized because of their tax-favoring policies especially lower rates and revenues and various tax exceptions, namely, for capital tax. Critical comments have even been made about the establishment of the flat tax in some of these countries. The indicators monitored in this comparison are the tax quota, the tax mix and the tax rates of corporations, as the taxes are potentially most affected by tax competition. Moreover, the focus is on the effective taxation of capital, labor and consumption, measured by implicit tax rates. The heteroscedastic and pair t-tests are used as the analysis tools, so that the statistical significance of the differences between the average values of the two compared groups can be tested. The tests confirmed the hypothesis of the non-statistically significant differences in the size of some of the pairs of researched averages. This paper originated as part of the projects financed by the Czech Science Foundation New Approaches to the Optimising Budgetary and Fiscal Policy with the Emphasis on Fiscal Discipline (Project No. 402/08/1134) and The analysis of the systems of delivering public services, and on the impact of the respective solution on the effectiveness of public expenditure (Project No. 402/05/2644).