人口規模、基礎建設社與租稅競爭

Population Size, Infrastructure Quality, and Tax Competition

The paper employs the framework of Haufler and Wooton (2010) to establish a model of oligopoly, in order to analyze how two countries with different population sizes in the same economic zone attract foreign direct investment (FDI) via their infrastructure qualities and tax rates. Under free trade and given infrastructure qualities, we derive a result that the population size does not affect the location choice of firms. Under lump-sum taxes, the optimal public infrastructure levels for the more populous country and the less populous country are the same, while the public infrastructure level depends positively on wage and negatively on market size. Despite different country sizes, the lump-sum taxes and tax difference both converge to zero when the two countries have the same quality level of public infrastructure. 本文利用Haufler and Wooton (2010)的架構建立一個理論模型來分析在同一個自由貿易區的兩個人口規模相異的國家，如何利用基礎建設及租稅政策來吸引外人直接投資。給定自由貿易及基礎建設的水平，本文得到人口規模的差異並不會影響廠商的區位選擇。給定定額租稅下，最適基礎建設的水平與工資成正比、與市場規模成反比，且不論人口多寡，兩國的最適基礎建設的水平會相同。當兩國的基礎建設水平維持在相同的水準時，人口規模不同的國家其租稅水準及租稅的差距都趨近於零。