La concurrence fiscale entre communes est-elle plus intense en milieu urbain qu’en milieu rural ?

Abstract

Is tax competition more intense in urban than in rural areas ? The aim of this paper is to test the hypothesis that tax competition intensity is stronger in urban area than in rural area. We use the theoretical foundations of tax competition literature where horizontal strategic interactions are due to tax base mobility between local jurisdictions belonging to the same level of government. When tax base is mobile, an action chosen by a jurisdiction affects the budget constraint of another jurisdiction, leading to strategic interactions in local fiscal choices. As a consequence, tax rates in one jurisdiction depend on tax rates in the neighbouring jurisdictions. We then build a spatial model of local tax choices which takes into account the fiscal decisions made by concurrent jurisdictions as well as the local socio-economic characteristics such as tax base and population density in the explanatory variables. More precisely, we test the existence of horizontal fiscal interactions inside some different groups of jurisdictions by estimating the slope of each reaction function. We measure the sign and the intensity of the spatial lag parameter using spatial econometrics. We then rely these estimates to the features of each group of jurisdictions and more particularly to its classification in urban areas and in rural areas. We observe that jurisdictions belonging to urban areas tend to mimic each other whereas those who belong to rural areas does not take into account the neighbouring tax choices when they set their local business tax. Rural jurisdictions set their local business tax only by looking at their own socio-economic features.