<Anchor>

Monday I will share a friendly economy with Kwon Ai-ri, an economical story in my life. welcome. (Good morning.) How did you pay this tax last year for the highest gross domestic product and GDP in the world?

<Reporter>

I want to know the facts about the tax increase last year. First, I think that last year's tax increased so much that most corporations, even large corporations, bear more taxes than individuals.

Recently, I have talked about semiconductors several times, but once I had good semiconductors last year, it is one of the big factors that caused the tax that I walked on.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the two major semiconductor companies in Korea, posted an operating profit of nearly 80 trillion won last year, not sales.

So, last year, the domestic corporation tax was about 12.5 trillion won and the corporate tax of SK Hynix was about 5 trillion won.

The taxes paid by these two companies will be close to one quarter of the total corporation tax in Korea in 2018. The total amount of corporate tax increase in Korea last year was 11.8 trillion won, and you can see that more than half of the increase is accounted for by two companies.

In addition, the increase in the taxes of the two companies is also influenced by the higher tax rates imposed on large corporations.

Since last year, large corporations with incomes over 300 billion won have incurred corporate tax burden by 25%. When the country decided this, I saw that the additional taxable amount would be about 2.2 trillion won.

Recently, according to the Korea Economic Research Institute estimates, I think that it actually increased by about 4.6 trillion won.

This is not just the two companies mentioned above, but also the 38 percent of the companies in our country who have increased the tax rate and added the extra burden.

<Anchor>

So where are the remaining taxes than the 38 or 40 companies?

<Reporter>

Income tax has also increased, but income tax has been raised by 9.4 trillion won more than in 2017. However, this was mainly due to the increase in capital gains tax on real estate transactions rather than on labor income tax.

Last year, the transfer income tax was 18 trillion won. It is about 3 trillion won more than the year before, and the government has 7,700 trillion won more than expected.

As you may have guessed, the most important reason is that the real estate prices in the Seoul metropolitan area have been high.

In fact, transactions are only active in the first half of last year, and in 2018, the total number of buildings sold or the number of homes sold is similar to that of 2017. It was rather a bit smaller.

However, as the real estate prices in the metropolitan area are running, it seems that the transaction tax on the transaction has increased overall.

This is mainly due to the increase in corporation tax and transfer income tax more than expected, and the tax has risen by 25.4 trillion won more than the government established last year. It is now the third year that the tax has exceeded tens of trillions.

<Anchor>

But this year, there is also talk about the real estate cliffs, it is still April, but the situation may change.

<Reporter>

Yes, this year is almost a mistake, as you said last year, tax revenue is hard to expect. So far, both corporate income tax and transfer income tax are not the same as last year.

Once the semiconductor industry is sinking, I can not expect the tax revenue I expected to return to, and the whole economy is worse than last year.

The same is true of real estate. Real estate transactions themselves are so small that we can not expect the same transfer tax last year.

However, there are many places where the government will spend money. We must cope with the trend of aging and continue to improve our welfare.

So, the rate that the country will spend more money for the next five years over the past year is also higher than planned for the year before. However, the tax revenue has started to flow in the opposite direction.

It is really a burden to mention the symptoms. Especially when the economy is getting worse as it is now, the fact that the government's tax revenues in such a situation is declining for several years at a considerable scale does not help people trust fiscal management.

So now it seems that the country needs to make an effort to judge the precise place where it should spend money and to push the tax reform carefully.

In OECD, Korea still has a low tax burden, though it is said that it is the seventh from the back, but if we break down the details, property tax and corporation tax are higher than GDP even in OECD.

It is one of the few OECD countries that have different economic structures and situations, and convincing them with these simple figures may not be immediately available to the public.

It seems more desirable to build a consensus on the issues and disputes that the country needs to solve and to establish confidence in taxation reforms rather than comparing it with overseas.