Agglomeration and actual tax rates: firm-level evidence from China. Regional Studies. Across China the lower quartile of firms pays almost no tax, whereas the upper quartile pays the full tax rate of 33%. This paper suggests that a driver of this phenomenon is heterogeneous agglomeration. Using the full sample of medium and large manufacturing firms in China from 2000 to 2007, the empirical estimation results confirm that more agglomerated regions generally collect tax at higher rates. Furthermore, the results show that the tax-agglomeration effect varies with firm mobility: the positive relationship between tax rates and agglomeration holds more for non-state-owned firms, which are more mobile, than for state-owned firms.