An Empirical Investigation of Elasticity of Direct Taxes in Kenya

Government of Kenya has continuously pursued tax reform agenda to increase its domestic’s tax revenues mobilization. This study examined the elasticity of direct income taxes as a measure of tax productivity in Kenya. Specifically, the paper examined the elasticity of Corporation tax, Property taxes (rental taxes) and personal income taxes (Pay As You Earn) as components of direct government tax revenues with respect to the changes in national income/ GDP at factor income as a proxy base. The study population for the research was the years from 2007 to 2017 financial year spanning for a period of 11 years. The study relied on secondary data and utilized a time series approach to estimate tax elasticity for Kenya for the period 2006/2007 to 2016/2017. Proportional Adjustment Method (PAM) model and Error Correction Mechanism (ECM) were adopted for data analysing. To check stationarity of the time series data, Phillips Perron (PP) and Augmented-Fuller (ADF) for unit root test techniques was adopted. The results revealed that direct taxes in Kenya are inelastic with elasticity value of 0.592 less than unit with an error correction coefficient of 0.7778. The study established that the direct tax revenue in Kenya is actually not responsive enough to changes in income growth since the coefficient of elasticity was less than a unity. Thus the system of direct taxes is not productive in general. Based on these findings, we recommend that the government of Kenya should strengthen tax reforms in order to increase the productivity of income tax revenue.