담배관련 세제 인상의 가계지출 및 소득분배 파급효과 분석

Abstract

Our study calculates the rate of tobacco expenditure to total consumption by each decile, and then examines if an increase in tobacco price has an impact on its expense and tax burden by decile, under assumptions of price elasticities in previous works, and finallymeasures income inequality indexes and regressivities by Kakwani index after its price increase through a tax rate increase, using 2009 National Survey of Tax and Benefit. Empirical results are as follows: First, a tobacco expenditure in most deciles, except for the first and the second decile, amounts to 70 Korean thousand Won. The rate of it to total consumption is the highest of 13.35%in the first decile, and themore income the less the rate. It means that the lowest class expends the tobacco excessively. Second, we divided into two cases in accordance with differences of price elasticities between income deciles, and then analyzed both household expenditure portfolios and income redistributive effects of two cases. In case 1, which is a wide difference of price elasticities between poor classes and non-poor ones (elasticities of 0.5 in the low class and 0.2 in the rest classes, on average 0.3), empirical results say that the quantity demanded of tobacco by poor deciles, in case of a raise in price by 100%,decreases more than in case of 50%, and thus the tobacco expenditure does not increase, while the tobacco-related taxes rise a bit. It implies that the cigarette price increase of 100% with tax is not likely to deteriorate the household expenditure patterns and after-tax income inequality, meaning the income distribution improvement. However, case 2 (elasticities of 0.3 in the lowclass and 0.4 in the rest classes) shows that tobacco-related taxes deteriorate the income distribution and it results in higher regresstivity relative to case 1. These implies that it is needed to give a special attention to an equity issue in a cigarette price hike, which would be effective for cutting back a smoking rate.