Государственная политика и структура доходов населения: эксперимент с самозанятостью

Abstract

Introduction: the most important reason for the phased launching in 2019 of the experiment on introducing a special tax regime “Tax on professional income” in the regions of Russia was to withdraw from the shadow the population incomes. A significant annual increase in the number of self-employed can be assessed as the success of the experiment, the significant results of which are both the growth of entrepreneurship and the increase in tax revenues to the budget. At the same time, there is another indicator that can act as an indicator of the policy – this is the change in the share of entrepreneurial activity income in the structure of the population incomes. Objectives: to assess, using econometric methods, the impact of introducing a tax on professional income on the share of entrepreneurial activity income in the population income structure in the Russian regions. Such estimates are not yet available in domestic scientific research. Methods: the “difference of differences” method, panel regression, statistical and graphical analysis. Results: at the first stage, calculations showed that in the four regions that entered the experiment in 2019, the expected effect, namely, an increase in the share of entrepreneurial activity income, did not manifest itself immediately. However, estimates on a group of 19 regions that entered the experiment from Jan. 1, 2020 revealed an impact effect equal to 0.2 %. In other words, despite the fact that in both the control and the experimental group of regions, the average values of changes in the share of entrepreneurial income were lower in 2020 compared to 2019, the introduction of the tax regime in 19 regions has significantly reduced this decrease in comparison with the control group. Conclusions: the statistically confirmed further growth in the share of population entrepreneurial activity income confirms the identified success of introducing the tax on professional income, along with other trends in indicators, such as an increase in the number of self-employed citizens and an increase in tax revenues to the budget. In general, such step-by-step experiments, when a solution is implemented first on one group of regions or citizens, with the use of appropriate methods, make it possible to obtain very significant results of policy evaluation.