Abstract

This paper examined the macroeconomic influence of tax reform on the Ethiopian economy using the Dynamic Computable General Equilibrium model. It utilized the updated 2009/2010 Ethiopian Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) from 2005/2006 developed by Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI). To investigate the impact of tax reform on the Ethiopian economy, different simulations were made turn by turn. First, a reduction in direct tax by 30% is introduced to see the impacts of direct tax reduction on the economy. As a result, macroeconomic variables such as GDP, absorption, private consumption, government expenditure, import, export, government income, investment, and aggregate output show a considerable improvement. Additionally, there is an increase in factor income and welfare gain for households though the factor supply of labor and land is fixed compared to base case scenarios. On the second simulation, an increase in sales tax by 67% was introduced to examine at the impact of sales tax on the economy. Thus, increases in sales tax improve the overall economic performance compared to direct reduction. However, under the third simulation decrease in import tariff by 24% worsened the general economic performance by encouraging import and depressing domestic output. Based on the finding, encouraging consumption tax reform, protecting the home country from external sector influence to encourage domestic production is the major policy option recommended to bring a good economic performance with lower distortion since we cannot abolish distortion when we conduct tax reform.

Key words: Ethiopia, tax reform, tax revenue, macroeconomics performance, dynamic computable general equilibrium.