Incidence of Corporate Income Tax: Estimates from Indian Manufacturing Firms

The purpose of this paper is to examine the incidence of corporate tax on capital and labour in Indian manufacturing sector. The paper employs ‘Seemingly Unrelated Regression Method’ with add-up restriction based on the work of Desai, Foley and Hines (2007). The study shows that the corporate tax has a significant adverse impact on both wages paid to employees and profit after tax. Capital owners bear 96.3 percent of the tax burden and labours bear only 3.7 percent. The adverse effect on wages is slightly higher in public firms than in private firms. The relative tax burdens of labour and capital remained the same in the pre-2008 global economic crisis and post crisis periods. The impact on both wages and profits increase with age and size of firms but decrease with leverage. These results will be useful to policymakers and other stakeholders to take appropriate strategies to design the corporate tax policy such that it is more redistributive and not burden to labours in manufacturing firms in India. The study considered only manufacturing sector for the period 2005-2019. This is the first study to analyse the relative contribution/burden of corporate tax shared by capital and labour in Indian manufacturing sector. The paper contributes to the scant empirical literature on corporate tax incidence.