저출산·고령화 시대의 조세정책 방향

Ageing population arising from low fertility and mortality is a universal phenomenon all over the world. Korea will, especially, reach a super-aged society from an ageing society in a shorter period of time than other states. This means that Korea is urgently required to prepare for what the population ageing would bring into economic growth and public finance. Low fertility will in the long run reduce labor force as well as total population, resulting in slowing down potential economic growth and in turn lowering tax revenues. In addition, population ageing will increase government expenditures for social security for elderly, which will increase a government deficit and debt. Thus, our tax policy should provide tax incentives for child-births to slow down the population reduction speed and for savings of current income for future spending to minimize the government’s social expenditures. Tax benefits for child-births have been focused on allowing deductions for child support expenses from taxable income. Such policy has, however, been viewed as insufficient and more effective tax policy is called for. A change in tax-filing unit to a family from an individual could be considered. The family tax-return will make lower the amount of tax payable than under the individual tax-return system since a lower marginal tax rate is applied to a fraction of the sum of taxable income of the family that is divided by the number of family. Thus, the change of tax-filing unit to family would have the effect of reducing tax revenues as a whole. In order to minimize the reduction in tax revenues, however, the unit change may be introduced in a limited scope. For example, such change could be applied to an individual taxpayer who has three children or more. Older population tend to have more consumption than income as compared to persons in a younger stage of life, and the amount of consumption in excess of the amount of income would necessarily be sponsored from the government funds. Accordingly, tax policy should be to provide tax incentives for saving income in an earlier stage of life for the future spending. Currently, the tax treatment for savings is TTE, which means that savings are made out of taxed income, all returns are taxed, and no further tax is due when savings are withdrawn. As tax benefits therefor, the change in tax treatment on savings may be considered from TTE to a more saving-neutral tax system such as an income tax with a rate-of-return allowance, which taxes labor earnings and supernormal returns to savings.