Daňové úlevy v České republice

The main objective of the thesis is to analyse tax expenditures in the tax system of the Czech Republic. More specifically to identify tax expenditures in legislation setting down personal income tax, corporate income tax and value added tax in 2008 and quantify their impact to tax revenues. The work starts with the review of the literature in this field. There is a rich academic literature dealing with various aspects of tax expenditure analysis starting with their identifi-cation and quantification and continuing to distributional analysis or analysis of compliance costs. Most if the literature originates in the United States where a substantial amount of pa-pers deals with the critique of official tax expenditure reports or with suggestions how to im-prove it. Similar topics are absent in the literature in other countries. Another source are the official tax expenditure reports published in several countries. The conclusion can be drawn that there are no internationally accepted standards of tax expenditures analysis. Another conclu-sion deals with the term tax expenditure itself. It was conceived in the United States in the 1960's to express that many tax reliefs are in fact direct expenditures hidden in the tax system. However sometimes provisions which are not analogical to direct expenditures are called tax expenditures as well. That's why the term tax expenditure is avoided in this thesis. Instead a more general term tax relief is used. Tax expenditures thus represent a subset of tax reliefs. Tax reliefs are defined as provisions of the tax law which represent lower tax liability or deferral of the tax liability for the tax payer. Tax reliefs are identified by their form, i.e. tax exemptions, reduced rates, tax credits etc. Features which represent an integral part of the tax system (e.g. deduction of input VAT) are not identified as a tax relief. This assures that the full list is created. Then the normative analysis is used to identify main rationale for each tax reliefs, i.e. tax reliefs which have been introduced in order to support other public policies' targets (genuine tax expenditures), tax relief which have been introduced in order to increase tax system effectiveness mainly by reducing the compliance costs and finally tax reliefs which share attribute of both aforementioned group. Based on this, there have been identified 210 tax reliefs (PIT: 119, CIT: 62, VAT: 29). From the point of view of further analysis, the most important part represent the genuine tax expenditures. Methods to quantify the identified tax reliefs were devised based on data avail-able. There was identified 57 tax expenditures out of all 210 tax reliefs with total amount of CZK 120 bn. It is important to bear in mind however that the simple addition of tax reliefs is not methodologically correct since abolition of several tax reliefs has different impact on tax revenues than addition of individually quantified impacts. The main contribution of the thesis consists in setting up a complete list of the tax re-liefs in the tax system of the Czech Republic for the taxes with the highest revenues. This will enable to prepare such an analysis on a regular basis, to include other taxes and to improve the methods used. The stakeholders in the field of public finance policy and tax policy will thus have more information available to design more effective policies. Further research dealing with other aspects of selected tax expenditures such as their distributional impacts can draw from this thesis as well.