Curbing Tax Harmful Competition

Tax competition in the form of harmful tax practices can distort trade and investment patterns, erode national tax bases and shift part of the tax burden onto less mobile tax bases. The Report emphasises that governments must intensify their cooperative actions to curb harmful tax practices.

Bi-lingual summary of the report on "Harmful tax competition: an emerging global issue".

Beginning with a primer on international taxation, this IEA monograph shows why the arguments used by governments to prevent tax competition are fallacious. It also outlines the threats to tax competition from the EU and OECD, and proposes ways in which the UK government should respond to those threats.

This article presents a history of international tax governance and offers a rationalist reconstruction of its institutional trajectory. As an unintended consequence of its institutional setup, the tax regime, which originally only dealt with double tax avoidance, endogenously produces harmful tax competition. Despite this negative effect there are only incremental and partial changes of the regime, which are insufficient to curb tax competition. I argue that this development can be explained by considering the properties - and the sequence in which they come up - of the collective action problems inherent in double tax avoidance and tax competition. First, in double tax avoidance, a coordination game with a distributive conflict, governments did not want to endanger the solution they had institutionalized long before tax competition became virulent. Second, governments are unable to resolve the emergent asymmetric prisoner's dilemma of tax competition due to conflicts of interest among big and small country governments and successful lobbying of corporate capital. As a result, the institutional trajectory is characterized by the simultaneous occurrence of stability in the core principles and indirect and incremental changes of the rules in the form of rule stretching and layering.

This comprehensive book adopts a nuanced yet straightforward approach to analysing the complex phenomenon of international tax competition. Using the ongoing international efforts of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU) as a basis for its analysis, it explores the mixed effects of tax competition and offers an effective approach that takes account of the asymmetrical global context.

Introduction -- Capital explosion -- Tax cut revolution -- Flat tax club -- Mobile brains and mobile wealth -- Taxing businesses in the global economy -- The economics of tax competition -- The battle for freedom and competition -- The moral case for tax competition -- Options for U.S. policy.

Explains why perfecting, rather than curbing, interstate competition would make international taxation both more efficient and more just.

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: This paper is intended to give an overview over Austrian advance rulings in an international context. In order to be able to outline the Austrian rulings practice and provisions that constitute a legal basis for advance rulings -- since in Austria rulings are not based upon one single law or provision but on many -- the term advance ruling will be defined as well and its meaning in international tax practice will be described. Moreover, this paper is intended to examine Austrian rulings measures in the light of the EU and OECD provisions against harmful tax competition, as well as under the state aid provisions of the EC Treaty. It is structured as follows: In the first part, the provisions of the EU (Code of Conduct of Business Taxation) and OECD (report on harmful tax competition) against harmful tax competition as well as the state aid provisions are described and the discussion, as to whether provisions against harmful tax competition are necessary at all, is outlined briefly. Then, international rulings practice is explained. Finally and essentially, Austrian rulings provisions are described in detail and assessed according to the criteria to identify harmful tax practices described in the provisions against harmful tax competition. This diploma thesis was written in the course of the EUCOTAX-program 2001/2002. EUCOTAX is a scientific cooperation between several European universities (i.e. European Universities Cooperating on Taxes). The intention of this program is to provide students and young academics with the experience of participating in an international tax conference. During their time of preparation, they are supported by senior experts. In the year 2002, the general topic was Tax Competition . This topic was split up into six sub-topics which were to be discussed in groups during this year's conference. These sub-topics were State aid , OECD report on harmful tax competition , Code of conduct of business taxation , Holding companies/exempt entities , CFC legislation , and Advance rulings . The conference was held from 4 April to 12 April 2002 in Tilburg, Netherlands. Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: Table of contents2 Dedication5 1.Preface6 2.Eu and OECD PRovisions against harmful tax competition8 2.1Are measures to curb harmful tax competition necessary?8 2.1.1Definition of harmful tax competition8 2.1.2Arguments in favor of the adoption of measures against harmful tax [...]