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To support the policies you just saw, the government needs to finalize next year's budget.

However, there are now two days left before the deadline for processing next year's budget proposed by the Speaker of the National Assembly, but negotiations between the ruling and opposition parties are blocked by the corporate tax cut issue and cannot move forward.

The ruling party, which wants to lower the highest corporate tax rate to attract foreign capital and promote investment by large companies, and the opposition party, which wants to lower the corporate tax rate for small and medium-sized companies instead of tax cuts for the rich, are running parallel.



Reporter Jo Ki-ho looked at the grounds for the contention of the ruling and opposition parties.



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Korea and Costa Rica are two countries in the OECD that have four stages of corporate taxation.



The ruling party's position is that the previous government's increase in the highest tax rate from 22% to 25% for companies with an operating profit of more than 300 billion won does not match the global trend of lowering corporate taxes to attract investment, so it must be put back.



[Chu Kyung-ho/Deputy Prime Minister for Economy (Last 9th): All OECD countries have competitively lowered corporate taxes.

On the other hand, the opposition party is in the position that the plan to



increase the 10% corporate tax, which is applied only to companies with an operating profit of 200 million won or less, to small and medium-sized businesses with an operating profit of 500 million won or less, as a tax cut for the ultra-rich, can provide even benefits. .



[Park Hong-geun/Democratic Party Representative: The Democratic Party is to give benefits to small and medium-sized businesses, which are the lowest segment.]



There are 103 companies benefiting from the government plan, and about 54,000 from the opposition party plan. The reduction in tax revenue is expected to be 2.5 trillion won for the government plan and 1.7 trillion won for the opposition party plan.



The grounds presented according to camp logic are sharply divergent, and it is becoming more difficult to find a point of contact.



Regarding the KDI research result that a 1 percentage point reduction in the corporate tax rate increases investment by 0.46%, the counterargument is that when the Lee Myung-bak administration lowered the corporate tax rate, companies did not increase employment and investment very much.



In addition, while Korea's absolute corporate tax rate is on the high side among OECD countries, there are data that show that the actual burden on companies, including social insurance such as health insurance premiums, is the lowest among OECD countries.



In particular, it is a problem that the judgment on whether it is the right time to take a tax reduction policy is completely missing.



This is because the Bank of Korea is taking a tightening monetary policy, such as raising interest rates, to control inflation, which can be interpreted as out of sync with fiscal policy and reduce the effectiveness of the policy.



[Ha Joon-kyung/Professor of Economics at Hanyang University: It seems that tax cuts are not a global trend.

Since we spent a lot of corona finances around the world, we have to expand our finances, and since inflation is severe right now, we have to pay more taxes...

.]



It is analyzed that the 'deferred' arbitration proposal of National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo to lower the maximum corporate tax rate to 22% as per the government's plan but implement it in two years is also analyzed to have come out in this context, and this relief is only intensifying amid opposition from the opposition party.



(Video coverage: Kim Min-cheol, Video editing: Lee Seung-hee)



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