Corporate Income Tax in Joint-Stock Companies in Serbia

Abstract

Since corporate tax returns are usually not publicly available, an issue of measuring tax burden has attracted the attention of academic research for the last few decades. Many measures of corporate income tax burden have been developed and in this paper accounting and current effective tax rates are used. On the sample of joint-stock companies on Belgrade Stock Exchange and period between 2016 and 2023, the paper shows that effective tax rates are, in general, slightly lower than statutory tax rate. Important portion of companies presents effective tax rate of 0%, despite presenting profit before taxation. In addition, it is showed that most developed listed companies have considerably lower effective tax rate than other listed companies and that the effective tax rates are lower for larger companies. The main reason should be found in tax incentives for investments in fixed assets that are available only to large companies.