AN ASSESSMENT OF THE ENERGY TAX BURDEN ON THE PHILIPPINE ECONOMY

This paper uses an aggregate modelling approach to assess the impacts of a redistribution of the taxes and duties that currently exist on crude oil and refined petroleum products in the Philippine economy. The approach used in the analysis consists of a general equilibrium model composed of fourteen producing sectors, fourteen consuming sectors, three household categories classified by income and a government. The effects of replacing the taxes and duties on crude oil and refined petroleum products with a more broad-based tax on manufacturing and service sectors output on prices and quantities are examined. The results are revealing. For example, the consequences of redistributing the tax burden away from petroleum products to the manufacturing and service sectors of the Philippine economy would be an increase in output by all producing sectors of about 3-5% or about 2.4 hundred billion Philippine pesos, a rise in the consumption of goods and services by about 6.1% or 1.6 hundred billion Philippine pesos, a rise in total utility by 6-9% or 1-9 hundred billion Philippine pesos and virtually no change in tax revenue for the government. When subjected to a sensitivity analysis, the results are reasonably robust with regard to the assumption of the values of the substitution eleasticities. That is, while the model's equilibrium values do vary in response to different assumptions of the values of these elasticities, the fluctutations are not so enormous to suggest that the model is unrealistically sensititve to these parameters.