税收优惠政策在推动高新技术产业发展方面具有积极作用。从20世纪80年代中期以来,中国制定了一系列税收优惠政策以鼓励和促进中国相关产业的发展。本文对中国自1987-2008年间近百份高新技术产业税收优惠政策文本,以政策发布年度、政策优惠对象、政策优惠税种、政策优惠措施为分析维度进行频数统计和量化分析,在揭示中国高新技术产业税收优惠政策的总体状况和发展历程的同时,也指出中国高新技术产业税收优惠政策在提升中国自主创新能力中存在四方面问题——政策具有明显阶段性,年度频率、密度的不平衡,其连续性和稳定性亟待进一步提高;税收优惠对象以区域区分为主,忽视了产业性优惠导向;税收优惠税种主要涉及所得税和增值税,以支持企业创新的生产投入和成果转化为主,对企业研发过程则缺乏有力的税收优惠激励;税收优惠措施以直接优惠为主,对投资抵免、加速折旧、R&D费用加计扣除或税收抵免、科技开发准备金提取等间接性优惠措施的采用较少,并针对这些问题提出意见和建议。

Tax incentives have positive effects on promoting high-tech industries. Since mid 1980s, China has formulated a series of tax preferential policies to encourage and promote the development of relevant high-tech industries in China. About one hundred China’s tax preferential policy documents on high-tech industries ranging from 1987 to 2008 are selected first time and then frequency analysis and quantitative analysis on them are conducted from four dimensions, which are annual policy promulgation, subjects of preferential policies, categories of preferential taxes, and measures of tax preferential policies. These analyses reveal the general situation of China’s tax preferential policies for high-tech industries and the development process, but at the same time, it is also found that China’s tax preferential policies for high-tech industries have four-category problems in enhancing China’s independent innovation capability. First, these policies display an obvious time-phase characteristic and an imbalance in annual frequency and density, and consequentially their continuity and stability need to be further improved; second, benefits of tax incentives are more focused on regions and are lack of industry orientation; third, categories of preferential taxes are primarily related to income tax and VAT tax in order to support the production inputs and the transformation of research findings by innovation enterprises, and therefore these preferential polices are lack of effective incentives towards the R&D process of enterprises; fourth, measures of tax incentives are mainly in the form of direct reduction of tax rate or amount, and less resort to indirect means, such as investment credits, accelerated depreciation, R&D costs deduction or tax credit, technology development fund extraction, etc. Comments and suggestions are proposed in here to address these problems.