The prospect of a “social” value added tax, which was raised anew by the President of France on December 31 during his New Year speech, is once again provoking controversy. While the French employers association, the MEDEF, has included this measure in a series of proposed tax changes designed to restore France’s competitiveness, the Left is mostly opposed. It views the “social VAT” as an oxymoron, an antisocial measure that is designed to cut the purchasing power of consumers and hits the poorest among them disproportionately and unfairly. But what exactly are we talking about? And from the viewpoint of taxes on consumption, what is the situation in France relative to its main European partners?
The proposal to establish a social VAT represents, in fact, a combination of two measures: raising the VAT rate and allocating the additional revenue obtained to finance social welfare, while lowering – in principle by the same amount – social contributions. The way that these two operations are conducted can differ greatly: the rise in VAT could involve the standard rate (currently 19.6%), the reduced rate (currently 5.5%, but recently increased to 7% for a range of products and services), the creation of an intermediate rate, a switch to the standard rate of certain products or services currently at the reduced rate, etc., while the reduction in social contributions could cover employer contributions or employee contributions, be uniform or targeted on low wages, etc. Many policy choices are available, with distributional impacts that are not identical.
France now has one of the lowest rates of implicit taxation on consumption in the European Union (Eurostat). Its standard VAT rate was reduced to 19.6% in 2000 after having been raised to 20.6% in 1995 to help ensure compliance with the Maastricht criteria, as the recession of 1993 had pushed the budget deficit significantly higher. This rate is now slightly lower than the rate applied by most of our partners, particularly as the deterioration of public finances has recently prompted several European countries to raise their standard rate of VAT. The reduced rate, at 5.5%, was, until the increase decided in December 2011 on certain products and services, the lowest in the EU.
What can we expect from a social VAT? Let’s consider in turn the effects on competitiveness and then on purchasing power, while distinguishing the two aspects of the operation. A VAT hike has a positive impact on the competitiveness of French business, because it increases the price of imports without burdening exports, which are subject to the VAT of the destination country. In this respect, a VAT increase is equivalent to a devaluation. In so far as most of France’s trade is conducted with our European partners within the European single market, this could be deemed a non-cooperative policy. Fine, but if all our partners were to use this type of “internal euro zone devaluation” – recall that in 2007 Germany increased its standard VAT rate from 16% to 19% – and we didn’t, this would actually amount to a real appreciation of the “French euro”. It would undoubtedly be better to aim for improved fiscal coordination in Europe, and to work for more uniform rates. But current circumstances are hardly favourable for that, and the threat of a VAT increase may be one way to encourage our main partner to show more cooperation on this issue.
Allocating the revenue raised to reduce social contributions will, in turn, have an additional positive impact on competitiveness only if it leads to a real reduction in the cost of labour to firms located in France. This would be the case if the reduction targeted employer contributions, but not if it were on employee contributions.
Can we expect a positive effect on employment? Yes, at a minimum thanks to the impact on competitiveness, but this would be small, unless we were to imagine a massive increase in VAT rates. The effect of lowering labour charges is less clear, because the employers’ social contributions are already zero or low on low wages, which, according to the available studies, is precisely the category of employees for which demand is sensitive to cost.
Isn’t the decline in the purchasing power of French households likely to reduce domestic consumption and cancel out these potential gains? In part perhaps, but it’s far from certain. Indeed, the rise in VAT is unlikely to be fully and immediately reflected in selling prices: in the case of Germany in 2007, the price increase was relatively small and spread over time –meaning that the margins of producers and distributors absorbed part of the increase, thus reducing the positive impact on business somewhat. In France, empirical work on the increase in 1995 shows that it too was not fully and immediately reflected in prices; and, although one cannot expect symmetrical results, it’s worth recalling that the cut in VAT in the restaurant business was not passed on much in prices.
Would the rise in VAT be “antisocial” because it winds up hitting the poorest households disproportionately? No! Don’t forget that the minimum income, the minimum wage (SMIC) and pensions are indexed to the consumer price index. So unless these indexes were somehow frozen – which the government has just done for some benefits – the purchasing power of low-income households would not be affected, and only employees earning above the minimum wage, together with earnings on savings, would suffer a decline in purchasing power, if consumer prices were to reflect the rise in VAT. It should also be noted that, if there is a positive impact on employment, some unemployed workers would find jobs and total payroll would increase, meaning that the depressive impact on consumption often cited by opponents of this measure would only be minor, or even non-existent.
In short, “social VAT” should be neither put on a pedestal nor dragged through the dirt. As with any tax reform, we should certainly not expect a panacea against unemployment, or even a massive shift in our external accounts, even though it should help to improve our external price-competitiveness. But rebalancing our tax burden to focus more on consumption and less on the cost of labour is a worthy goal. In the context of globalization, taxing consumption is a good way to provide resources for the public purse, and VAT, a French innovation that has been adopted by almost every country, is a convenient way of doing this and of applying, without explicitly saying so, a form of protectionism through the de-taxation of exports. VAT is not, on the other hand, a good instrument for redistribution, since the use of a reduced rate on consumer products ultimately benefits the better-off as much or more than it does the poor. Most of our European partners have understood this, as they either do not have a reduced rate (as in Denmark) or have one that is substantially higher than ours (often 10% or 12%). It would be desirable to make the French tax system fairer, but this requires the use of instruments that have the greatest and best-targeted potential for redistribution: direct taxes – income tax, CSG-type wealth taxes, property tax – or social transfers, or even certain government expenditures (education, health). What is missing in the proposed “social VAT” is making it part of a comprehensive fiscal reform that restores consistency and justice to the system of taxes and social contributions as a whole.