Abstract:

As the demographic dividend fades away, the population aging has become a challenge that China must deal with to ensure high-quality economic development. The population aging not only restricts the supply-side structural reforms, but also reshapes the economic environment faced by the macroeconomic policies. As the focus of China’s fiscal and taxation system reform, taxes and fees reduction are a powerful financial tool for the government to respond to the downward pressure on the economy and ensure the smooth operation of the economy. It is an important task of the macroeconomic research to explore the effectiveness of taxes and fees reduction in the face of the deepening of the aging degree and the increase in fiscal pressure. In view of this, this paper characterizes two types of age heterogeneous families, working families and retired families, according to the income sources and the labor participation characteristics of people of different ages, divides tax and social insurance premiums in detail, and then introduces them into the New Keynesian analysis framework to construct the TANK-DSGE model.
Based on the calibration of the model parameters, this paper simulates and analyzes the impact of taxes and fees reduction on the consumption structure, the level of output, employment, investment, and the inflation gap dimensions such as the dynamic macroeconomic effect. Furthermore, this paper calculates the long-term fiscal multiplier of taxes and fees reduction at different aging levels, and conducts a comparative analysis of the welfare loss to explore the impact of aging on the long-term policy effect of taxes and fees reduction. It is found that in the short term, tax cuts on labor and capital as well as cuts in social security fees can promote the economic growth, stimulate young people’s consumption and trigger inflation, and have a crowding out effect on the consumption of the elderly. The consumption tax reduction not only promotes the economic growth and the employment, but also enhances the overall consumption level. With the deepening of the aging degree, the space for policy adjustment becomes tighter, and the effectiveness of taxes and fees reduction policies declines. In the long run, the deepening of aging aggravates the long-term adjustment effect of taxes and fees reduction on the economic growth, investment and consumption. At the same time, with the further tightening of the policy adjustment space, the negative effect of the social welfare loss is amplified. To sum up, under the background of the population aging, active regulation measures such as taxes and fees reduction have different mechanisms of action on macroeconomic variables, and have a crowding out effect on the consumption of the elderly population when they play positive roles in promoting the economic growth, employment and stimulating consumption.
Population aging reduces the labor supply, which not only weakens the effectiveness of the fiscal policy, but also aggravates the loss of the social welfare. In view of this, in order to ensure that policies play a more efficient role, it is necessary to attach importance to the coordination and cooperation among policies, especially to give full play to the role of the transfer payment for the protection of vulnerable groups. It is also necessary to adjust the population structure and the labor participation rate to properly deal with the aging problem. That is, to fully liberalize the fertility policy to increase the fertility rate to curb the long-term impact of aging, and to improve the labor participation rate and the human capital productivity to deal with the short-term impact by delaying retirement, educational reform and human capital investment. Finally, in order to avoid the impact of the transfer expenditure growth on fiscal sustainability, the pay-as-you-go social security system should be reformed and the cost-sharing and benefit-sharing in the social welfare expenditure such as the pension and the medical care should be strengthened.

Key words: Population Aging, Heterogeneous Families, Taxes and Fees Reduction, TANK-DSGE Model

摘要：

为厘清减税降费政策在我国人口老龄化程度不断加深的背景下调控宏观经济的政策效应,本文将年龄异质性家庭、减税降费政策引入新凯恩斯分析框架构造TANK-DSGE模型。通过不同老龄化水平下减税降费短期政策效应的动态模拟,以及长期财政乘数与福利损失分析后,本文发现:劳动、资本减税与社保降费政策均可促进经济增长并刺激年轻群体消费引发通胀,同时会挤出老年群体消费;消费减税则促进了整体消费水平的提升。伴随老龄化程度的加深,政策调整空间趋紧,减税降费的有效性下降:一方面,有效性下降表现为老龄化程度加深在减弱了宏观调控的短期刺激效应的同时,恶化了减税降费对经济增长、投资和消费的长期调节效果;另一方面,有效性下降表现为政策造成社会福利损失增加,政策的负向效应被强化。

关键词: 人口老龄化, 异质性家庭, 减税降费, TANK-DSGE模型