The End of the Alberta Tax Advantage

Download or read book The End of the Alberta Tax Advantage written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tax advantage with which Alberta emerged from the reform process just described had three primary pillars: a low, single-rate personal income tax with high basic and spousal exemptions, a corporate income tax rate that was far below the national average (and in fact was the lowest in Canada), and the absence of a sales tax. [...] In this section, we assess the impact of the recent tax policy changes on each of the three key pillars of Alberta's tax advantage to assess whether the province does in fact still enjoy a meaningful tax advantage relative to peer jurisdictions. [...] Whereas Alberta once had a clear tax advantage over all of the rest of the country on corporate income tax rates, the province is now solidly in the middle of the Canadian pack when it comes to this particularly harmful form of taxation. [...] However, it should be noted that from an economic efficiency perspective, the province's sales tax advantage was considerably less important than fraserinstitute.org The End of the Alberta Tax Advantage"/"23 the other two pillars of the tax advantage. [...] While sales taxes are less distortion- ary than many other forms of taxation, they nevertheless increase the tax burden and therefore have an impact on economic competitiveness.11 The analysis presented in this section shows that the third pillar of Alberta's tax advantage-the absence of a provincial level sales tax in the province-is the only one still standing.