Abstract

In 2001, the newly elected government announced a wide reform of corporate taxation: the Dual income tax system enacted in 1997 by the previous government was greatly limited in its beneficial effects and should be abolished in favour of a single tax rate regime. In the meantime, the existing system of temporary incentives to investment was prolonged, but radically changed. A major difference is that the new incentive is not conditional upon the financing behaviour of companies. Under the new policy course the neutrality of the tax system between debt and equity finance does not seem to be considered an important issue. The emphasis is on the reduction of the overall tax burden on profits. This paper uses the micromodel of corporate taxation MATIS, and data from the balance sheets of a panel of manufacturing companies, to evaluate the possible impact of these recent tax reforms on firms' cash flow. The results show that the new tax policy is not so clearly superior to the one followed by the previous government in reducing the overall tax burden on companies, and will even be worse, in perspective, when comparing the Dual income tax system with the announced uniform tax rate of 33%.