REDISTRIBUTIVE EFFECTS OF VALUE ADDED TAX IN POLAND

The aim of the article is to define the redistributive effects of taxing the consumption of Polish households with Value Added Tax in the years 1995-2016. In this article, an attempt of statistical assessment of trends and the scale of effects of VAT taxation on individual consumption as well as to determine the nature of the Polish VAT (its regressiveness, progressiveness, or linearity) has been taken. The study of Polish households' burden with VAT has been divided into two major stages. The first one focused on determining, based on a detailed list of household expenses, the amount of VAT paid in the expenses of particular types of households. In the second stage, VAT burden was estimated by referring the amount of VAT paid to the net income of a given type of household. Net incomes are all values that enter the household, without advances on income tax from natural persons paid by the payer on behalf of the taxpayer, and without social security contributions. The research was based on unpublished GUS data from the Household Budgets Surveys (1995-2016) according to decile income groups. In the methodological layer, emphasis was put on the issue of differentiating rates of consumption taxes.