Personal income tax management in Ukraine on the game theory basis

Abstract

One of the main problems of the fiscal decentralization in Ukraine is the substantiation of the optimal proportion of the personal income tax distribution among the state and different types of local budgets in order to insure the sufficient financial resources for the territorial communities. Since period of the Budget Code adoption, the percentage of the personal income tax paid from salaries to the different levels of budgets has changed three times. However, the methodic of such distribution is not clear. The authors suggest approach of analyzing the logic of the personal income tax distribution on the game theory basis. They consider different ways of making decisions and prove that in all of the analyzed cases the winner was the central government of Ukraine. Such behavior of the central government in making decisions does not meet the goals of the fiscal decentralization reform. The main reason of such situation is that the decisions are made by the state government, but not by the local communities or their representatives. Besides, it is difficult to distribute the expenditures among different types of budgets according to the Governments’ competences. The authors suggest some recommendation of the personal income tax distribution in order to ensure benefits for all participants of the game: communities, local governments and central government. But they conclude that the active influence of people on the behavior of the local governments is the basic premise for the scientific research of the PIT optimal distribution.