THE COST OF NEGATIVE INCOME TAX AS A FISCAL MEASURE TO TACKLE POVERTY IN NORTH MACEDONIA

Abstract

This paper makes an effort to evaluate the cost of negative income tax as a fiscal measure aiming to tackle the persistent high poverty rate in Macedonia. Poverty, income inequality and unemployment are expected to rise all around the world due to the pandemic corona virus outbreak and the subsequent economic crisis. Governments around the world have already implemented measures similar to universal basic income with the purpose of increasing household consumption and stimulating aggregate demand but also to mitigate the devastating effects that the recent unfavorable economic developments have on the citizens living in poverty or are at the risk of poverty. However, shrinking fiscal spaces of small economies could be an obstacle to implement such policies. Compared to universal basic income, negative income tax is a less costly policy option that targets the population living in poverty instead of providing payments to everyone regardless of their income. The analysis based on the available data is indicating that implementing such policy would cost as much as 9.7 billion MKD per year, which is 4% of the planned state budget revenues for Y2020, 8% of the planned social transfers for Y2020 and 29% of the funds that the state has made available for tackling the COVID 19 crisis so far. In addition, the negative income tax could trigger various positive effects on the economy. Since poor people spend almost all of their income, it could be expected that implementing negative income tax would rise household consumption. According to the empirical analysis in this paper, household consumption is in highest correlation to GDP growth in Macedonia compared to the other explanatory variables (government consumption, investments, import and export).