Incentivi agli investimenti e tassazione dei profitti: l'impatto delle recenti riforme fiscali sul cash flow delle imprese

The new government proposes a radical reform of corporations taxation. The first step has been to “freeze” the Dual income tax and to substitute the previous incentive to investments, so called legge Visco, with the old “legge Tremonti” that cannot add to the tax investment credit to firms in the South. Next step should be definitively to abandon the dual corporation tax model and to adopt a single rate model with a tax rate of 33%. The principal aim of this reform is to reduce tax burden on firms cash flow.This paper tests empirically the impact of new and old tax instruments on cash flow of the Italian corporations, using a panel data of manufacture sector corporations (Centrale dei Bilanci) and simulating all tax measures with the micromodel Matis (Capp and Department of Economics of Bologna University).Our results cast doubts on the more effectiveness of the new incentive, with respects to the previous ones, in reducing corporations tax burden. The single rate model of corporation tax, as well, does not prove to reduce tax pressure on corporations cash flow more than the dual one.