La riforma italiana della tassazione delle imprese e i suoi effetti sulle decisioni di investimento

The Italian Budget Law for the year 2008 introduces a business tax reform, which is inspired to an analogous reform established in Germany in the same year, with the aim of making the corporate taxation system more attractive for capital flows and capable of enhancing firms’ investment activities. The paper focuses on the latter issue and addresses the analysis of the potential effects of the diverse measures adopted with the reform on the dynamics of corporate investments. The essay is organised as follows. In the first section a review of the innovations introduced with the reform is provided; the second paragraph discusses the major elements of the reform’s rationale; in the third section we analyse the effects of the main novelties through a simulation based on firm level data derived by the last two waves of the Capitalia Survey on manufacturing companies covering the period 1998-2003. Finally, in order to further analyse the potential impact of the reform on firms’ decisions, paragraph four presents the results of econometric estimates of the functions of financial debts and corporate investments, which take into account the effects of proper fiscal variables.