Tax Revenue Forecast Errors: Wrong Predictions of the Tax Base or the Elasticity?

Marcell Göttert and Robert Lehmann

No 9148, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: In this paper, we disentangle tax revenue forecast errors into influences stemming from wrong macroeconomic assumptions and false predictions of the elasticities linking the tax base to its corresponding tax type. Across six tax types and the overall tax sum for Germany, we find a heterogeneous degree of relative importance of both sources. Whereas wrong macroeconomic assumptions matter most for profit-related taxes and the wage tax, false predictions of the elasticities mainly drive the forecast errors of the energy tax and the sales taxes. For the overall tax sum, more than two-third of the error can be attributed to wrong macroeconomic predictions and approximately one-third to false assumptions on the elasticity. Our results suggest that outsourcing the macroeconomic projections to an independent forecaster and methodological improvements can reduce tax revenue forecast errors.

Keywords: tax revenue forecasting; tax elasticity; unbiasedness; forecast errors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H29 H68 H69 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-pbe and nep-pub
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9148

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