Reform of the Unified Social Tax and the Shadow Sector in Health Care and Education

摘要

The consequences of introducing various taxes or changing the way existing taxes are collected (involving changes in the tax base and tax rates) are traditionally analyzed using quantitative methods in the context of the generally accepted Arrow-Debreu model of the economy, where the government plays the role of an institution that regulates aggregate welfare and its distribution among agents. This approach is not directly applicable when investigating processes within an economic system, especially the Russian transition economy, because it assumes that the agents behave rationally and decisions are made through optimization mechanisms.rnThis article analyzes the consequences of a reduction in the unified social tax (UST) rate in the context of a general equilibrium model. The initial resource distribution and values of determinants of economic behavior (e.g., parameters of consumers' and producers' preferences and utility functions, public welfare functions, etc.) are taken as the decisive criteria.