China's automobile consumption fell in April, and it is currently predicted that automobile consumption may be difficult to improve throughout the second quarter, which will inevitably greatly drag down the development of the automobile industry.
At present, China's auto market urgently needs a series of stimulus consumption to stimulate the auto industry, for three reasons:
1. The automobile industry chain involves a wide range of aspects, the amount of employment carried is large, and the new infrastructure investment is also partly driven by the automobile industry.
2. The current growth rate of resident credit is insufficient, and under the premise of real estate credit pressure, it is a necessary means to use auto credit to drive credit growth.
3, automobile consumption is a more direct means to stimulate residents' consumption, which can increase the total consumption relatively quickly.
While it may seem like a one-sentence thing to support car consumption, it's an economic ledger in itself. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology supports it, which also requires the Ministry of Finance and the State Administration of Taxation to issue documents to implement it.
So what are the obstacles to stimulating car consumption now?
First, China is currently supporting the consumption of new energy vehicles, theoretically there is support for automobile consumption, but further support for automobile consumption is bound to increase subsidies for fuel vehicles.
Second, new energy vehicles are exempt from purchase tax, which has a significant impact on the car purchase tax, and further expansion of automobile promotion will further reduce fiscal revenue, and road administration and transportation infrastructure expenditure will be affected.
Third, China's automobile consumption market is no longer the first purchase, and the pull effect of automobile consumption policy remains to be seen.
The essence of this economic account is: by expanding the support of automobile consumption, it is possible to stimulate the economy, and it is also necessary to ensure that the entire fiscal expenditure maintains a corresponding balance.
To this end, we have done some research, and the reference materials are mainly "Authoritative Experts: Actively Responding to the Impact of Changes in Car Purchase Tax Revenue".
First of all, China's vehicle purchase tax revenue has been stable in recent years, and it has not been affected by the decline in sales.
From 2017 to 2021, the domestic automobile purchase tax revenue is divided into -
In 2017, the vehicle purchase tax was 328.1 billion yuan, an increase of 22.7% year-on-year;
In 2018, the vehicle purchase tax was 345.3 billion yuan, an increase of 5.2% year-on-year. ；
Vehicle purchase tax in 2019 was 349.8 billion yuan, an increase of 1.3% year-on-year;
Vehicle purchase tax in 2020 was 353.1 billion yuan, an increase of 0.9% year-on-year;
Vehicle purchase tax in 2021 was 352 billion yuan, down 0.3% year-on-year.
These sets of data are very interesting, in fact, the sales volume of China's automobile market has begun to decline year by year since it peaked at 29 million units in 2017, and last year it was about 26 million units. However, the purchase tax is increasing year by year, and even in 2020 and 2021, when sales are more difficult, the purchase tax is stable at about 350 billion yuan - and there are almost 5 million new energy vehicles that are exempt from purchase tax - which means that the domestic bicycle purchase tax has increased by about 12%, so the average purchase price has also increased by almost the same proportion.
In other words, an increase in purchase tax revenue from the increase in luxury car consumption offset the impact of the decline in sales.
Secondly, the growth rate of new energy vehicles is very fast, and the growth rate of luxury new energy vehicles is considerable, which will affect the purchase tax revenue.
According to the data, new energy vehicles with an average price of more than 300,000 yuan in 2021 include ideal ONE, Weilai ES6/EC6/ES8, BMW 5 Series plug-in hybrid, BMW iX3, and some Tesla Model Y, Extreme Kr 001 and other models. The combined number of these models is about 230,000 to 250,000. If all Tesla models are classified as high-end models, then the entire magnitude is close to 500,000 vehicles.
These new energy luxury electric vehicles play a role in replacing traditional luxury cars, which means that the purchase tax will also be affected. According to the forecast of Essence Securities, the sales of pure electric vehicles with bicycles priced at more than 200,000 yuan are expected to reach 1.41 million units in 2022, while Soochow Securities predicts that the sales scale of B-class and C-class PHEV models will be about 420,000 units.
That is to say, the total number of luxury new energy vehicles will reach about 1.8 million, and if all of them replace the same price of fuel luxury vehicles, it will reduce the purchase tax by about 30-50 billion yuan.
Third, the increase in new energy vehicles may affect local fiscal revenues such as road maintenance fees and vehicle and vessel taxes.
At present, new energy vehicles are exempt from vehicle and vessel taxes, and at the same time, without refueling, the "fuel surcharge" that accounts for about 45% of the oil price cannot provide support for local finances.
At present, the annual domestic vehicle and vessel tax revenue is about 94.5 billion yuan, which is expected to be around 100 billion yuan in 2021, but the growth rate has slowed down to less than 10%. According to statistics, in 2020, the largest proportion of vehicle and vessel tax revenue in the provinces is Heilongjiang Province, reaching 3.10%; the smallest proportion is Shanghai, which is only 0.35%. The proportion of vehicle and vessel tax revenue in various provinces is less than 1.0% of tax revenue in Zhejiang, Tianjin, Hainan, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Beijing and Shanghai.
The vehicle and vessel tax itself is a small tax, coupled with the high proportion of new energy vehicles in economically developed areas, so the proportion of vehicle and vessel tax in economically developed areas is relatively low. But at the same time, like the economically underdeveloped northeast, Ningxia, Gansu and other regions, new energy vehicles themselves are few, so the vehicle and vessel tax has become an important economic source of local finance.
Similarly, because new energy vehicles do not need to refuel, there are no additional taxes and fees for gasoline and diesel. For local finances, with the gradual increase of new energy vehicles, the growth rate of fuel surcharge revenue has slowed down, which has begun to trigger some seesaw effects of local fiscal revenue and expenditure - although fuel surcharges do not look much at first glance, this is a fixed and predictable income every year, especially after the new energy of high-end models, the growth rate of fuel demand will be greatly reduced.
To sum up the above discussion, that is, although the unit price of car purchases in China's auto market is increasing, the rapid development of New Energy Vehicles in China is bound to make the annual purchase tax revenue of 350 billion yuan begin to enter a downward period. If the financial support for the consumption of fuel vehicles continues, the main impact is the purchase tax revenue, and the transfer payment of the Ministry of Finance to the local finance will also decline, while the vehicle and vessel tax, fuel surcharge, etc. have affected the local finance because of the increase in new energy vehicles. Therefore, the implementation of larger-scale support for automobile consumption seems to be difficult to implement from a financial point of view.
So, is there any way to support the consumption of fuel vehicles while continuing to maintain support for new energy vehicles?
The answer may be to change the current way of "robbing the poor and helping the rich" of new energy consumption, readjusting to support low-end automobile consumption, and subsidizing low-end cars with the tax revenue of high-end cars. That is to say, we can exempt the purchase tax of the A-class car part by taxing high-end new energy vehicles in policy, which is the purpose of stimulating automobile consumers.
Several different ways of policy support can be further discussed.
Strategy 1: Continue the previous strategy of reducing the purchase tax by 50% for models with displacement below 1.6L. Under this strategy, new energy vehicles will also be subject to a 50% purchase tax.
Of course, because many luxury brands and mid-to-high-end cars now also have a powertrain such as 1.5T, it is not a complete subsidy for low-end models, but it is also better than the previous full payment.
In this way, the fuel passenger car with an displacement of less than 1.6 liters may be about 13 million units, plus the forecast value of 5 million new energy vehicles, then the models that can enjoy 50% purchase tax reduction are about 18 million. The fuel passenger cars that were taxed last year also happened to be 18 million, and their purchase tax was about 350 billion, so it can be replaced by the tax payment of high-end fuel vehicles with the tax payment of new energy models. Then we can expect that the revenue after the purchase tax for models under 1.6L is halved is about 170 billion.
For high-end models above 200,000 yuan, the estimated sales volume is about 3.885 million vehicles, which can earn about 140 billion yuan in full payment of purchase tax.
In this way, under the premise of halving the purchase tax for models below 1.6L, the fiscal side has been reduced by about 40 billion yuan compared with the previous one. At the same time, considering that China will not generally subsidize new energy vehicles in 2023, according to the Ministry of Finance's "2021 Energy Conservation and Emission Reduction Subsidy Fund Budget Local Allocation Results" mentioned in the new energy vehicle promotion subsidy amount of 16 billion yuan, then the additional support of the national finance car consumption is about 24 billion yuan.
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Strategy 2: Exempt models under 150,000 yuan from full purchase tax and full purchase tax on medium and high-end new energy vehicles.
But as Saint Seiya said, "This trick has not been used a second time", not to mention that the 50% purchase tax reduction for the 1.6L model has been used twice. Coupled with the fact that the decline in automobile consumption and the overall economic situation may be more severe than in 2015, can we introduce more supportive consumption policies?
If there is, it is a full reduction in purchase tax for some models, as it has been done for new energy vehicles in previous years, which can quickly increase consumption. So what part of this part of the model is it? Naturally, it is the A-class car that low-end consumers need.
If the purchase tax can be waived for vehicles of Class A and below, the support for automobile consumption will be unprecedented. However, there are two problems: 1, how much financial reduction will be brought about by the full exemption of vehicle purchase tax of Class A and below; 2. How to determine class A vehicles is a more complicated matter.
On the first question, we also made some calculations:
Assuming that the sales of A00-A-class fuel vehicles do not increase in 2022, the sales volume of this part of the model is about 12.95 million units. Based on the average transaction price of 130,000 yuan (including tax), the average amount of purchase tax collected is about 11,500 yuan, and the total amount is about 150 billion yuan. At the same time, A00-A class new energy vehicles should also fall within the scope of tax reduction, but because they have not been levied before, they do not affect the total amount.
In other words, if the purchase tax is fully exempted for A-class and below models, there will be a fiscal and tax gap of 150 billion yuan. This gap needs to be filled by other models - such as the full purchase tax on mid-to-high-end new energy vehicles, that is, B-class and C-class new energy vehicles.
At present, the consumption of new energy vehicles is more concentrated on high-end models, such as 830,000 B/C class pure electric vehicles last year, and 260,000 B/C class PHEV models last year, which is about 1.09 million. According to the forecast data, in 2022, there will be 1.94 million B-class new energy vehicles and 120,000 C-class new energy vehicles, equivalent to 2.06 million, and by 2023, it will increase by 40% on this basis, which will be close to 2.9 million.
If calculated according to the transaction price of 300,000 yuan and the average tax amount of 26,500 yuan, it is that the high-end new energy vehicles in 2023 can increase the fiscal and tax revenue by about 77 billion yuan. In fact, because the average transaction price may be higher, then in the end, high-end new energy vehicles will be charged the purchase tax in full, which should easily reach about 80 billion yuan.
Also counting the surplus of 16 billion yuan brought about by the cessation of new energy subsidies, then after the full exemption of the purchase tax on A-class and below models, and the full collection of B-class/C-class new energy vehicle purchase tax, the national finance will reduce the tax amount by an additional 54 billion yuan, and the entire purchase tax revenue will be about 290 billion yuan.
Of course, in practice, it may be more complicated, such as the average transaction price of A-class vehicles may be less than 130,000 yuan, while the average price of high-end new energy vehicles may be higher than 300,000 yuan. But this is just a simple mathematical relationship to consider the impact on the purchase tax.
On the second question, how to define the A-class car? We believe that in fact, we can refer to the current financial subsidy more popular division method, using the "naked car price of less than 150,000 yuan (that is, excluding tax price) models" to cross the line, basically can cover all A-class and below models.
If you use 150,000 yuan to draw the line, according to the sub-price data of 2021, the number of fuel vehicles below 150,000 yuan in the mainland is about 10.8 million, even if the actual scale of some margins is about 12 million. At the same time, new energy vehicles of more than 150,000 yuan are also included in the scope of taxation, so it can further control the fiscal revenue reduction to about 40 billion.
Strategy three: Exempt models under 150,000 yuan from purchase tax, and halve all new energy vehicles.
With the above calculation data, the data of strategy three is relatively clear. The full exemption from the purchase tax for models below 150,000 yuan will reduce the purchase tax income of 150 billion yuan; then 2.9 million high-end new energy vehicles pay the purchase tax at 50%, that is about 40 billion yuan of income. In this way, the entire purchase tax gap is about 110 billion yuan, deducting the 16 billion yuan of expenditure that should have been paid for the new energy subsidies before, which is also close to 94 billion yuan.
This means that the entire car purchase tax will fall directly from 350 billion to about 250 billion. This figure is closer to the situation in 2016 when the Ministry of Finance charged purchase tax on models with less than 1.6L displacement halved, and in 2016, 28 million vehicles were sold in the Chinese auto market, and the purchase tax revenue was 267.4 billion yuan. The impact of this drastic reduction of hundreds of billions of tax revenues is still relatively large.
Strategy 4: In 2022, models below 1.6L will be exempted from purchase tax, and in 2023, the halving will be adopted.
The above three strategies are only for the entire year, or more accurately, the purchase tax impact for the full year of 2023. In fact, if the need for current policy support is taken into account, the entire tax cut policy is best to start in May this year and continue until the end of 2023, with a relatively long cycle.
Then this can be divided into two parts: 1, 2022, first of all, the full exemption of purchase tax for models below 1.6L, and the continuation of the previous exemption and subsidy policy for new energy vehicles; 2, starting from January 1, 2023, the implementation of strategy 1, but the object is halved for models below 1.6L to collect purchase tax.
In this way, the reduction in purchase tax in 2022 is about 75 billion yuan; and in 2023, with reference to strategy one, the reduction in purchase tax in 2023 will be about 40 billion yuan. The total fiscal reduction of the two years is 115 billion yuan in purchase tax revenue, but this can not only ensure the recovery of automobile consumption in 2022, but also ensure that the automobile purchase tax revenue in 2023 will not be reduced too much.
At the same time, some specific restrictions can be made on tax reduction products, such as models with displacement below 1.6L also need to meet the conditions of bare car ticketing price of less than 200,000 yuan. The reason for choosing less than 200,000 yuan is also to support middle-class consumers and provide certain subsidies for joint venture products.
If the financial pressure is taken into account, the same can be set aside a requirement of 200,000 yuan for the reduction and reduction policy of new energy vehicles, and the tax amount of high-end models can be increased, but this cannot play a guiding role in the development of new energy.
Driver's Summary:
From this, we can formulate several corresponding plans for automobile consumption policy support:
First, in the remaining time of 2022, implement the consumption support policy of full exemption from the purchase tax of models with displacement below 1.6L, and at the same time meet the conditions that the invoice price of naked cars without tax is less than 200,000 yuan.
Second, in 2023, the purchase tax will be levied on models with displacement below 1.6L and new energy vehicles, and the invoice price of fuel vehicles without tax will be less than 200,000 yuan.
Third, support all localities to increase subsidies in 2023 and provide an additional 50% purchase tax subsidy.
Fourth, bank credit can carry out specific discounts on automobile consumption, especially for new energy models, and can use "carbon emission reduction credit tools" to leverage.
Overall, the current support policies for automobile consumption should be fast, not slow. This is not only because we are the auto media to call for this, but from the perspective of the whole industry, the automotive industry chain can drive the most extensive employment and consumption, the sales scale of 25 million cars is equivalent to more than 3 trillion consumption, and the entire automotive industry accounts for 4% of GDP.
With 100 billion yuan of fiscal tax cut support to leverage trillions, there is probably nothing more suitable than the automobile industry.
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