Abstract: In recent years, E-commerce has been enjoying rapid development in China where more and more enterprises choose to adopt online means to expand the market and promote sales, and the online retail scale continues to increase. However, during this process, the tax system still focuses more on the traditional economy and it's not suitable for the newly emerging economic model, thus the tax compliance of e-commerce needs to be improved. For a long time, both the academic circles and the public have been concerned about e-commerce's tax evasion, but there is a lack of direct evidence on large sample level in existing studies. Based on the World Bank China-Enterprise Surveys Data (2012) and adopting the model of Logistic, this study finds that the online sales significantly reduce enterprises' actual tax burden. Every 1% increase in the online sales would lead to 3.6% reduction of the actual tax burden on average. Therefore, this paper provides the evidence of tax evasion problems in e-commerce.
This paper also analyzes the specific patterns of e-commerce tax evasion. First of all, there is a positive relationship between the degree of e-commerce tax evasion and the scale of the online sales. The more the online sales, the more obvious the reduction of the actual tax burden of enterprises, that is, the greater the degree of tax evasion. Secondly, tax evasion mainly occurs in tangible goods industries, while it is not obvious in service industries. For commodity industries composed of manufacturing, wholesale and retail, the online sales' coefficient is highly significant at the level of 1%, while it's not significant for service enterprises. Thirdly, tax evasion has nothing to do with the size of e-commerce enterprises. We introduce both the cross terms of the online sales and the total sales scale, the online sales and the employee scale to identify whether the e-commerce tax evasion is affected by the size of enterprises. The results show that the coefficients of the two cross terms are not significant, indicating that there is no significant relationship between the e-commerce tax evasion the enterprise size, that is to say, both the large and the small enterprises have tax evasion behaviors influenced by e-commerce. Fourthly, female managers can improve the e-commerce tax compliance of enterprises, and the tax evasion behavior of enterprises under their management is not obvious. The samples are divided into two groups for regression according to whether there are female owners or female executives. In the samples of the enterprises with female owners or female executives, the online sales have no significant impact on the actual tax burden of enterprises.
Finally, we adopt two alternative variables to measure the actual tax burden of enterprises and set up four models for robustness tests. The results show that the online sales do reduce the actual tax burden, and there are tax evasion and non-compliance behaviors in e-commerce. This means that our empirical research conclusions are robust and reliable.
Attention should be paid to the adverse effects of tax evasionconsidering the growing scale of e-commerce. This paper has made a beneficial expansion of the domestic e-commerce tax research field, and the relevant conclusions have a certain enlightenment significance for improving the compliance level of e-commerce. Specifically, this paper suggests building a tax collection and management system compatible with the development of e-commerce, especially focusing on strengthening the collection and application of the e-commerce tax-related information. In addition, since female managers do not have e-commerce tax evasion behaviors, it is feasible to take certain measures to improve the voluntary compliance level of e-commerce enterprises.

Key words: Digital Economy, Online Sales, Tax Compliamce, Tax Evasion

摘要： 近年来,我国数字经济快速发展,越来越多企业选择采取线上方式开拓市场、扩大销售,网上零售规模不断增加。在这个过程中,对数字经济中电子商务税收遵从问题的关注始终存在,但已有研究尚缺乏大样本层面的直接证据。本文基于世界银行中国企业调查数据,研究发现网络销售显著降低了企业实际税负,从而证实企业在数字经济中开展电子商务存在逃避税的税收遵从问题。同时,本文还发现数字经济中电子商务逃避税具有以下特征:电子商务逃避税程度与网络销售规模呈正比关系;逃避税主要发生在有形商品行业;逃避税与企业规模无关,无论大企业还是小企业都存在逃避税;女性管理者可提高企业纳税遵从度,其管理下的企业逃避税行为不明显。

关键词: 数字经济, 网络销售, 税收遵从, 逃避税