Fiscal Pressure in Romania and the Influence of the Value Added Tax

Fiscal pressure is an economic phenomenon, tolerated by natural or legal persons within certain limits, which expresses the intensity with which a percentage of the population's income is taken through direct or indirect taxation. For the Romanian economy, fiscal pressure is an extensive indicator because it shows the taxpayers' burden towards their obligation to pay taxes. Because of the need or the desire to oppose this economic phenomenon, some taxpayers resort to different methods to avoid the varied mandatory tax payments to the Romanian state, especially the value-added tax payments. For this reason, we consider that fiscal pressure could be one of the current problems in the Romanian society. The purpose of this article is to identify whether certain taxes and fees of the Romanian state lead to a high fiscal pressure on the Romanian taxpayer, and to show the evolution of these taxes and fees of the Romanian government. For this purpose, the authors built an econometric model, through which they aimed to capture the influencing factors of fiscal pressure in Romania, during the period between 1998 and 2018. After we performed the error-specific tests, namely the Harvey homoscedasticity test and the Jarque-Bera normality test, we obtained a multiple regression model, which revealed that the value-added tax and the level of the gross domestic product have a strong influence on the fiscal pressure, with a 5% level of significance taken into account.