## ANNEX I. GCC TAX INCENTIVES AND EXEMPTION __________________________________________ 221

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### Timeline of selected tax reform milestones
- 1932
- 1950
- 1951
  - Saudi Arabia renewed efforts to implement Zakat.
  - Saudi Arabia introduced personal income, capital gains, and corporate taxes, including income tax on hydrocarbon companies. Income taxes were reformed later in the year to exclude nationals.
  - Saudi Arabia established the Department for Zakat and Income Tax.
  - Saudi Arabia introduced a 2.5 percent Zakat on the net worth of both individuals and companies of nationals and resident citizens of GCC countries.
- 1955
  - Kuwait introduced a 55 percent CIT on both foreign and hydrocarbon companies.
  - Qatar introduced a 50 percent CIT on both foreign and hydrocarbon companies.
- 1960
  - UAE introduced a 55 percent and 20 percent CIT on hydrocarbon companies & foreign banks, respectively.
- 1971
  - Oman introduced its first CIT law for both foreigner & domestic companies, as well as hydrocarbon companies.
- 1975
  - Saudi Arabia suspended personal income taxes for non-nationals due to the need to attract foreign investment.
- 1979
  - Bahrain introduced a 46 percent CIT on hydrocarbon companies.
- 1985
  - Bahrain proposed a CIT on foreign companies but was not implemented.
- 1988
  - Saudi Arabia reintroduced a 45 percent CIT on foreign companies.
- 1990
  - Saudi Arabia reduced CIT rate to 30 percent on foreign companies.
- 1993
  - Qatar reduced CIT to 35 percent [this also applied to hydrocarbon companies].
- 1994
  - Oman amended CIT to include only industrial and commercial companies at a rate of 50 percent [incl. hydrocarbon companies].
- 2001
  - Oman added professional enterprises to the CIT coverage and reduced the rate to 12 percent.
- 2007
  - Kuwait reduced the CIT rate to 15 percent [incl. hydrocarbon companies].
  - Kuwait introduced Zakat at a rate of 1 percent on net profits of Kuwaiti companies.
  - Saudi Arabia reduced the CIT on foreign investors from 30 to 20 percent.
- 2009
  - Bahrain proposed a CIT on foreigners (excl. hydrocarbon companies), but this wasn't implemented.
- 2010
  - Qatar reduced CIT for foreign companies from 35 percent to 10 percent.
  - Oman increased CIT on hydrocarbon companies to 55 percent.
  - Oman implemented at 10 percent withholding tax on companies that do not have a permanent establishment.

### Annex II — GCC tax incentives and exemptions (country summaries)
- Bahrain
  - No tax incentives and exemptions.
- Kuwait
  - 5-year tax holiday on non-Kuwait investment & leasing companies in Kuwait under the leasing & investment law No.12 of 1998.
  - Expedited process for foreign investment through the Kuwait Direct Investment Promotion Authority.
  - Foreign companies with 100 percent foreign ownership.
  - Total or partial exemption of custom duties for imports.
  - Tax credits including foreign tax credits for countries with treaty agreements with Kuwait.
- Oman
  - Foreign tax credits and 5- year tax exemptions for industry (manufacturing) activities.
  - 25–30-year exemptions to companies operating under Special Economic and Free zones in Oman.
- Qatar
  - Foreign tax credits.
  - Entities under the Qatar Science and Technology Park are fully exempt from tax.
  - A 20-year tax holiday (including corporate tax, customs tax, and personal income tax) for companies operating in the free zones with 100 percent foreign ownership.
  - Interest and returns on public debt securities and Islamic financial securities, and bonds of public bodies and corporations.
  - Gross income of companies working in agriculture, fisheries and foreign air and sea navigation companies.
- Saudi Arabia
  - Foreign tax credits.
  - 10-year tax incentives including no custom duties on strategic imports for projects invested in less developed regions.
  - Transactions between entities in/between special economic zones (SEZs).
  - Tax discount for a period of 20 years within SEZs.
- United Arab Emirates (UAE)
  - A free zone company in the UAE may be able to qualify for a 0% CIT rate, if it meets all the conditions to be considered as a Qualifying Free Zone Person. This includes certain exemptions of customs duties and VAT for some UAE Free Zones.
  - Exemptions related to the recently introduced corporate tax:
    - Businesses engaged in the extraction of natural resources, as these businesses will remain subject to the current Emirate level corporate taxation.
    - Dividends and capital gains earned by a UAE business from its qualifying shareholdings.
    - Individuals are not subject to CIT on their personal investment or real estate income and gains.
    - Businesses qualifying for small business relief will be treated as not having any taxable income and will be subject to simplified reporting requirements (i.e., those businesses with income of less than AED3m in a tax period).
    - 0% withholding taxes on cross-boarder payments.
  - Other incentives include:
    - Targeted incentives for certain entities e.g., investment funds, pension funds and public benefit entities, etc.
    - Tax-free business restructuring transactions and transfers within a qualifying group.
    - Transitional relief which exempts pre-corporate tax gains on certain assets.
    - No Corporate Tax for small businesses with revenues not exceeding AED 3,000,000 (USD 800,000).
    - Foreign tax credits.
    - Foreign branch exemption.
    - Tax grouping for UAE businesses.
    - Ability to utilize tax losses in future periods without a time limitation as well as transfer tax losses between group companies.
    - Tax transparency for personal wealth management and succession planning vehicles, with no Corporate Tax on the individual beneficiaries.

### Annex III — Data appendix: collection, cleaning, and sample composition
- Data collection process
  - Data collected from the S&P Capital IQ (Compustat) database for each year separately, spanning the period from 2007 to 2022.
  - Annual datasets combined into time series datasets for individual firms and aggregated into a single panel dataset covering 2007–2022.
- Data cleaning and filtering
  - Applied a 90% winsorization (trimming) methodology: observations surpassing the 95th percentile set to the value of the 95th percentile; those beneath the 5th percentile set to the value of the 5th percentile.
  - Flagged and removed data points with issues including:
    - sum of equity and total debt greater than total assets;
    - cash greater than total assets;
    - total assets negative;
    - net income exceeds sales.
  - Each flagged data point received a unique flag value; data points with non-zero flag values were removed.
  - Duplicate observations removed.
  - Observations with excessive missing data excluded.
  - No regression-based imputation techniques used to fill small missing values.
- Sample counts (final number of firms per country per year retained after cleaning and filtering)
  - Note: presented as sequences per year (2007 through 2022) aligned with the source table.
  - Bahrain: 79 74 48 98 81 11 13 16 15 13 14
  - Kuwait: 49 51 46 75 83 84 88 57 47 66 46 77 15 36 369
  - Oman: 50 56 61 59 53 62 61 57 62 60 56 50 58 54 47 53
  - Qatar: 17 20 20 18 20 21 22 22 24 23 24 23 29 30 28 30
  - Saudi Arabia: 26 30 37 45 67 79 82 83 85 94 95 96 126 139 148 181
  - United Arab Emirates: 54 53 50 47 51 62 66 60 58 64 68 65 78 70 69 73
  - Total: 203 219 221 248 278 316 328 315 311 328 318 314 378 361 368 420

### Assumptions and limitations of the firm-level dataset
- S&P Capital IQ primarily covers publicly traded companies, potentially biasing the sample toward larger, more established firms and limiting generalizability to smaller or privately held companies.
- Possible lags in reporting within S&P Capital IQ data could delay availability of certain data points.
- Potential survivorship bias, as S&P Capital IQ primarily includes active companies that have not gone bankrupt or delisted; collecting data separately for each year mitigates but may not fully eliminate this bias.

*Source: wpiea2025074-print-pdf - ANNEX I. GCC TAX INCENTIVES AND EXEMPTION __________________________________________ 221*

### ANNEX I. GCC TAX INCENTIVES AND EXEMPTION __________________________________________ 221

### ANNEX I. GCC TAX INCENTIVES AND EXEMPTION __________________________________________ 221

### Annex listing
- ANNEX I. GCC TAX INCENTIVES AND EXEMPTION __________________________________________ 221
- ANNEX II. TAX REFORMS BEFORE 2015 ________________________________________________________ 22
- ANNEX III. DATA APPENDIX _____________________________________________________________________ 24

*Source: wpiea2025074-print-pdf - ANNEX I. GCC TAX INCENTIVES AND EXEMPTION __________________________________________ 221*

### REFERENCES  ____________________________________________________________________________________ 25

### wpiea2025074-print-pdf - REFERENCES

### I. Introduction: context and motivation
- Over much of the past century, the six GCC states heavily relied on oil revenues; up to 2015, the average ratio of oil and gas revenue to total revenue was 83 percent on average across the GCC.
- Public consumption and investment represented close to 30 percent of GDP (2014) on average, and almost 40 percent for Oman and Saudi Arabia (2015).
- Compared to BRICS, GCC firms have maintained low debt levels and sustained high levels of profitability since 2007 (figures shown for Return on Equity and Leverage across 2007–Q1 2022).
- The 2014 collapse in global oil prices triggered spending cuts, tax policy and subsidy reforms; GCC-wide excise and VAT tax treaties of 2016 broadened GCC tax systems, and broadening the corporate income taxation (CIT) base has been gaining steam.
- This paper is the first to estimate the impact of GCC tax policy reforms on economic activity and firm-level financials across the GCC.

### II. Fiscal developments and reforms
- Historical overview (pre-2015):
  - Saudi Arabia introduced personal and corporate income taxes and capital gains in 1950; major changes and suspensions followed through 1975.
  - Corporate income tax experiences across GCC: Saudi Arabia (foreign CIT reintroduced 1980s at 45 percent, reduced to 30 percent then 20 percent), Kuwait and Qatar initially 55 and 50 percent (1955) reduced to 15 percent (Kuwait, 2007) and 10 percent (Qatar, 2010). Bahrain has no CIT outside oil and gas (46 percent for oil and gas companies).
  - Oman: earliest broad CIT prior to 2015; CIT introduced 1971 (income tax law), implemented 1994, rate reduced to 12 percent in 2001, raised to 15 percent in 2010, hydrocarbon companies taxed at 55 percent.
  - Customs: Common External Tariff framework (CET) implemented January 1, 2003; non-GCC products generally subject to 5 percent customs duty (with exemptions).
  - Non-oil tax revenue stayed low: about 4 percent of total revenue (1.6 percent of GDP) between 2010 and 2014; total non-oil revenue around 5 to 7 percent of GDP in same period.
- Reforms since 2015:
  - Sharp oil price decline from mid-2014 prompted tax reforms. A GCC excise tax treaty introduced in 2016 (excises on energy and soft drinks, and tobacco as of 2017). The 2016 VAT tax treaty set stage for uniform 5 percent VAT across GCC.
  - Implementation varied by country; Kuwait and Qatar did not implement VAT by the time of the analysis (Qatar had introduced excises).
  - Recent changes include VAT increases: Bahrain to 10 percent; Saudi Arabia to 15 percent. Excise regimes broadened to include electronic smoking devices, other sugary products, alcohol and pork. Excise rates levied at either 50 or 100 percent.
  - As of the analysis, Bahrain remained the only GCC without any form of corporate taxation outside the oil and gas sector. Oman: broad CIT of 15 percent (increased from 12 percent in 2017). Saudi Arabia levies Zakat of 2.5 percent on national companies and individuals (not mandatory for individuals).
  - UAE introduced a federal CIT in June 2023 with a 9 percent standard rate for taxable income exceeding 375,000 UAE dirhams ($102,000), with various exemptions and a potential 0% for Qualifying Free Zone Persons.
  - Pandemic response temporarily slowed reform momentum with deferrals and exemptions; by end-2022 most COVID fiscal measures were phased out.

### III. Empirical strategy and data
- Macro analysis:
  - Fixed effects panel regressions and local projection method (Jordà, 2005) used for data spanning 2002 to 2022.
  - Dependent variables Y: total or non-oil real GDP growth, growth of private consumption, investment (real terms), inflation, exports, imports for country i at time t.
  - Controls X: lagged country-specific real GDP growth, world real GDP growth, average federal reserve interest rate (financial tightness proxy), international oil prices, COVID stringency index (OxCGRT; 0–100 scale).
  - Fiscal variables Z: VAT and CIT rates in levels; composite excise tax rate index as simple average across 7 excise categories (soft drinks, energy drinks, tobacco, electronic smoking and related components, other sugary products, alcohol and pork).
  - CIT on foreign firms used as proxy for overall CIT when applicable; CIT excluded from macro analysis due to insufficient observations.
- Firm-level analysis:
  - S&P Capital IQ (Compustat) dataset 2007–2022 in an unbalanced panel; average 308 firms per year; minimum 203 companies in 2007. Observations by country: Bahrain 157, Kuwait 1,098, Oman 899, Qatar 371, Saudi Arabia 1,413, United Arab Emirates 988 (Table 1 totals: firms × years).
  - Robustness: 90% winsorization applied (values beyond 95th percentile set to 95th; below 5th set to 5th).
  - Dependent variables: ROA and ROE. ROA mean 4.7, ROE mean 12.8; YoY Change ROA -2%, ROE -1%; Standard Deviation ROA 4.4, ROE 22.7; Min ROA -0.5, Min ROE -21.5; Max ROA 40.9, Max ROE 173.0; IQR ROA 3.26, ROE 10.18 (Table 2).
  - Firm-level regression controls: lagged firm-level controls (ROA, ROE, total assets, current ratio, asset turnover, debt to equity), country/world-level controls; fixed effects by industry and country; clustered standard errors by industry groups.
  - Local projection specification used to estimate medium-term impacts up to 3 years following tax changes.

### IV. Results
- Macro-level findings
  - VAT:
    - VAT is found to impact GDP and non-oil GDP positively, especially in the year following implementation or rate increase.
    - VAT pushes inflation up in the year of the VAT rate increase by 0.4 percent for each 1 percent rate increase, but this inflationary effect reverses in the following year to the same magnitude (short-lived inflation effect).
    - Private consumption rebounds in the year following VAT implementation, and imports increase; private investment impact found insignificant.
    - Interpreted as evidence of functioning VAT refund systems and possible compensating fiscal measures (e.g., scaled-up social support like Saudi Arabia’s Citizen account) and confidence effects.
  - Excise taxes:
    - Excise tax increases impact GDP, non-oil GDP, private consumption and import growth negatively in the year of implementation, but these effects reverse in the following year.
    - Sum of contemporaneous and lagged excise coefficients is significantly positive for GDP and non-oil GDP (insignificant for private consumption and imports).
    - Impact on inflation, private investment and export growth found insignificant.
    - Overall effect characterized as small.
- Firm-level findings
  - Indirect taxes (VAT and excises) in year of implementation:
    - No significant impact on aggregate ROA or ROE across all firms.
    - However, sectoral heterogeneity: firms targeted by excise taxes (food and tobacco) show significant reductions in ROE following excise increases; ROA for these firms shows no immediate significant effect in the contemporaneous year but negative effects in medium term (local projections).
    - Excise increases may incentivize smuggling and illegal activity in targeted products, affecting sectoral firms.
  - Corporate Income Tax (CIT) on foreign firms:
    - A one-percent increase in foreign CIT is associated with a reduction of 0.03 percent in ROA (statistically significant); similar negative impact on ROE.
    - Firm-size heterogeneity: small firms (bottom quartile by total assets) experience a one-unit increase in foreign CIT associated with a reduction of 0.3 percent in ROA and 0.5 percent in ROE; large firms (top quartile) experience a reduction of 0.05 percent in ROA and no significant impact on ROE.
    - Interpretation: CIT increases disproportionately burden SMEs; exemptions and reliefs may favor larger firms; larger firms can better spread compliance and operational costs.
  - Medium-term dynamics (local projections up to 3 years):
    - VAT: remains insignificant for ROA in medium term; positive impact on ROE emerges roughly 2 years following VAT shocks (consistent with positive macro non-oil GDP effects).
    - Excises: cumulative negative impact on food and tobacco firms’ ROE continues to increase in the subsequent year and then stabilizes.
    - CIT: weighs on both small and large firms' ROA in medium term, with smaller firms affected disproportionately.

### V. Policy implications and recommendations
- Revenue diversification and tax expansion:
  - Continued broadening of tax systems (VAT, excises, CIT) is noted across GCC, but effective rates remain low with many exemptions and incentives; Kuwait and Bahrain lag behind peers.
  - With international pressure on profit taxation and uncertainty in oil markets, revenue diversification is crucial.
- Design considerations for CIT:
  - Avoid penalizing small firms: CIT reforms should consider differentiated treatment for SMEs to mitigate disproportionate negative impacts.
  - Keep reforms broad and avoid excessive exemptions and complex regimes to ensure evenhandedness between large and small firms.
  - Streamline administrative and financial fees that disproportionately burden SMEs.
- Indirect taxes and competitiveness:
  - VAT implementation appears to have small positive macro effects and short-lived inflationary impacts; functioning refund systems appear important to limit firm-level impacts.
  - Excise taxes effectively target specific sectors but produce limited economy-wide effects; harmonization of excise rates across GCC could reduce smuggling incentives.
- Broader reform agenda:
  - Tax reforms should follow international best practices while preserving foreign direct investment.
  - Considerations of the international Minimum Corporate Tax make the design of profit taxation increasingly relevant.
  - Reforms to labor and product market structures remain critical determinants of competitiveness alongside tax policy.
- Country specificity:
  - While commonalities exist across GCC, economic and fiscal structures differ; policy changes need to be tailored to country-specific circumstances.

*Source: IMF Working Paper — A new GCC Fiscal Era – A Look at the Macro and Firm-Level Impact of Tax Reforms (content from wpiea2025074-print-pdf - REFERENCES).*

### Annex I. Tax Reforms before 2015

### Annex I. Tax Reforms before 2015

### Timeline of tax reforms (selected milestones)
- 1932
- 1950
- 1951
  - Saudi Arabia renewed efforts to implement Zakat.
  - Saudi Arabia introduced personal income, capital gains, and corporate taxes, including income tax on hydrocarbon companies. Income taxes were reformed later in the year to exclude nationals.
  - Saudi Arabia established the Department for Zakat and Income Tax.
  - Saudi Arabia introduced a 2.5 percent Zakat on the net worth of both individuals and companies of nationals and resident citizens of GCC countries.
- 1955
  - Kuwait introduced a 55 percent CIT on both foreign and hydrocarbon companies.
  - Qatar introduced a 50 percent CIT on both foreign and hydrocarbon companies.
- 1960
  - UAE introduced a 55 percent and 20 percent CIT on hydrocarbon companies & foreign banks, respectively.
- 1971
  - Oman introduced its first CIT law for both foreigner & domestic companies, as well as hydrocarbon companies.
- 1975
  - Saudi Arabia suspended personal income taxes for non-nationals due to the need to attract foreign investment.
- 1979
  - Bahrain introduced a 46 percent CIT on hydrocarbon companies.
- 1985
  - Bahrain proposed a CIT on foreign companies but was not implemented.
- 1988
  - Saudi Arabia reintroduced a 45 percent CIT on foreign companies.
- 1990
  - Saudi Arabia reduced CIT rate to 30 percent on foreign companies.
- 1993
  - Qatar reduced CIT to 35 percent [this also applied to hydrocarbon companies].
- 1994
  - Oman amended CIT to include only industrial and commercial companies at a rate of 50 percent [incl. hydrocarbon companies].
- 2001
  - Oman added professional enterprises to the CIT coverage and reduced the rate to 12 percent.
- 2007
  - Kuwait reduced the CIT rate to 15 percent [incl. hydrocarbon companies].
  - Kuwait introduced Zakat at a rate of 1 percent on net profits of Kuwaiti companies.
  - Saudi Arabia reduced the CIT on foreign investors from 30 to 20 percent.
- 2009
  - Bahrain proposed a CIT on foreigners (excl. hydrocarbon companies), but this wasn't implemented.
- 2010
  - Qatar reduced CIT for foreign companies from 35 percent to 10 percent.
  - Oman increased CIT on hydrocarbon companies to 55 percent.
  - Oman implemented at 10 percent withholding tax on companies that do not have a permanent establishment.

### Annex II — GCC tax incentives and exemptions (country summaries)
- Bahrain
  - No tax incentives and exemptions.
- Kuwait
  - 5-year tax holiday on non-Kuwait investment & leasing companies in Kuwait under the leasing & investment law No.12 of 1998.
  - Expedited process for foreign investment through the Kuwait Direct Investment Promotion Authority.
  - Foreign companies with 100 percent foreign ownership.
  - Total or partial exemption of custom duties for imports.
  - Tax credits including foreign tax credits for countries with treaty agreements with Kuwait.
- Oman
  - Foreign tax credits and 5- year tax exemptions for industry (manufacturing) activities.
  - 25–30-year exemptions to companies operating under Special Economic and Free zones in Oman.
- Qatar
  - Foreign tax credits.
  - Entities under the Qatar Science and Technology Park are fully exempt from tax.
  - A 20-year tax holiday (including corporate tax, customs tax, and personal income tax) for companies operating in the free zones with 100 percent foreign ownership.
  - Interest and returns on public debt securities and Islamic financial securities, and bonds of public bodies and corporations.
  - Gross income of companies working in agriculture, fisheries and foreign air and sea navigation companies.
- Saudi Arabia
  - Foreign tax credits.
  - 10-year tax incentives including no custom duties on strategic imports for projects invested in less developed regions.
  - Transactions between entities in/between special economic zones (SEZs).
  - Tax discount for a period of 20 years within SEZs.
- United Arab Emirates (UAE)
  - A free zone company in the UAE may be able to qualify for a 0% CIT rate, if it meets all the conditions to be considered as a Qualifying Free Zone Person. This includes certain exemptions of customs duties and VAT for some UAE Free Zones.
  - Exemptions related to the recently introduced corporate tax:
    - Businesses engaged in the extraction of natural resources, as these businesses will remain subject to the current Emirate level corporate taxation.
    - Dividends and capital gains earned by a UAE business from its qualifying shareholdings.
    - Individuals are not subject to CIT on their personal investment or real estate income and gains.
    - Businesses qualifying for small business relief will be treated as not having any taxable income and will be subject to simplified reporting requirements (i.e., those businesses with income of less than AED3m in a tax period).
    - 0% withholding taxes on cross-boarder payments.
  - Other incentives include:
    - Targeted incentives for certain entities e.g., investment funds, pension funds and public benefit entities, etc.
    - Tax-free business restructuring transactions and transfers within a qualifying group.
    - Transitional relief which exempts pre-corporate tax gains on certain assets.
    - No Corporate Tax for small businesses with revenues not exceeding AED 3,000,000 (USD 800,000).
    - Foreign tax credits.
    - Foreign branch exemption.
    - Tax grouping for UAE businesses.
    - Ability to utilize tax losses in future periods without a time limitation as well as transfer tax losses between group companies.
    - Tax transparency for personal wealth management and succession planning vehicles, with no Corporate Tax on the individual beneficiaries.

### Annex III — Data appendix: collection, cleaning, and sample composition
- Data collection process
  - Data collected from the S&P Capital IQ (Compustat) database for each year separately, spanning the period from 2007 to 2022.
  - Annual datasets combined into time series datasets for individual firms and aggregated into a single panel dataset covering 2007–2022.
- Data cleaning and filtering
  - Applied a 90% winsorization (trimming) methodology: observations surpassing the 95th percentile set to the value of the 95th percentile; those beneath the 5th percentile set to the value of the 5th percentile.
  - Flagged and removed data points with issues including:
    - sum of equity and total debt greater than total assets;
    - cash greater than total assets;
    - total assets negative;
    - net income exceeds sales.
  - Each flagged data point received a unique flag value; data points with non-zero flag values were removed.
  - Duplicate observations removed.
  - Observations with excessive missing data excluded.
  - No regression-based imputation techniques used to fill small missing values.
- Sample counts (final number of firms per country per year retained after cleaning and filtering)
  - Note: presented as sequences per year (2007 through 2022) aligned with the source table.
  - Bahrain: 79 74 48 98 81 11 13 16 15 13 14
  - Kuwait: 49 51 46 75 83 84 88 57 47 66 46 77 15 36 369
  - Oman: 50 56 61 59 53 62 61 57 62 60 56 50 58 54 47 53
  - Qatar: 17 20 20 18 20 21 22 22 24 23 24 23 29 30 28 30
  - Saudi Arabia: 26 30 37 45 67 79 82 83 85 94 95 96 126 139 148 181
  - United Arab Emirates: 54 53 50 47 51 62 66 60 58 64 68 65 78 70 69 73
  - Total: 203 219 221 248 278 316 328 315 311 328 318 314 378 361 368 420

### Assumptions and limitations of the firm-level dataset
- S&P Capital IQ primarily covers publicly traded companies, potentially biasing the sample toward larger, more established firms and limiting generalizability to smaller or privately held companies.
- Possible lags in reporting within S&P Capital IQ data could delay availability of certain data points.
- Potential survivorship bias, as S&P Capital IQ primarily includes active companies that have not gone bankrupt or delisted; collecting data separately for each year mitigates but may not fully eliminate this bias.

*Source: wpiea2025074-print-pdf - Annex I. Tax Reforms before 2015 (IMF Working Paper A new GCC Fiscal Era – A Look at the Macro and Firm-Level Impact of Tax Reforms).*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/wp/2025/english/wpiea2025074-print-pdf.pdf_