Tax Burden on Investment at Shareholder Level: Calculating the Effects from Double Taxation in Macedonia

The struggle against the enlarged public debt has finally ended with widespread rise of mandatory tax rates across the European countries and worldwide. Surprisingly, the Republic of Macedonia (RM) has managed to preserve its tax policy relatively unaffected, despite the negative trends - but only temporarily. Recent announcements made by the new government to raise the tax rates in near future echoed very unpleasantly across the business community, declaring the ending, in that context, of the era of low tax rates. The work in this paper is intended to measure the level of tax burden at the shareholder level in Macedonia over the period from 2006 to 2017, which is known as the “golden period” of low tax rates. Relevant measurements used for the purpose of this research are: the cost of capital, the effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) and the effective average tax rate (EATR). The applied measurements are correspondent to the fundamental methodology according to the Devereux-Griffith approach, recommended by the EU Commission. This analysis and its result are complementary to our previous findings about the effective tax rates at corporate level. Hopefully, they will reconfirm and extend the general picture of the RM as one of the most tax favorable country for investment in Europe…..so far.   Keywords  Corporate Income Tax (CIT), Personal Income Tax (PIT), double taxation, integrated tax system, cost of capital, Effective Marginal Tax Rates (EMTR), Effective Average Tax Rates (EATR), Republic of Macedonia (RM)