From Double Tax Avoidance To Tax Competition

The book describes the difficulties of the current international corporate income tax system. It starts by describing its origins and how changes, such as the development of multinational enterprises and digitalization have created fundamental problems, not foreseen at its inception. These include tax competition—as governments try to attract tax bases through low tax rates or incentives, and profit shifting, as companies avoid tax by reporting profits in jurisdictions with lower tax rates. The book then discusses solutions, including both evolutionary changes to the current system and fundamental reform options. It covers both reform efforts already under way, for example under the Inclusive Framework at the OECD, and potential radical reform ideas developed by academics.

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.

Over the past few decades, the concentration of wealth and property in the hands of a few has been facilitated by tax evasion, tax avoidance, and above all by tax competition. Fortunately, a determined move toward international cooperation among tax authorities is gathering its forces to do battle. This invaluable book shows how the globalization of trade, the digitization of the economy, tax competition between sovereign states, the erosion of the tax base, and the transfer of pro ts have all revealed the weaknesses of a traditional tax system that has reached its limits, and how numerous states and groups of states have joined efforts in creating a new international tax system designed to restore fairness and stability in the levying of taxes worldwide. Stemming from a 2016 conference initiated by the Canadian non-pro t organization TaxCOOP, convened by the World Bank and bringing together well-known taxation experts from prominent international organizations, the book presents outstanding contributions highlighting the impacts of tax competition and viable solutions. Among the issues and topics covered are the following: – electronic commerce and electronic money; – transfer pricing; – derivatives and hedge funds; – protecting tax whistle-blowers; – offshore tax investigations; – possibility of an international tax court; – impact of tax competition on developing countries; – carbon pricing; – tobacco taxation; and – effective taxation of the ultra-wealthy and their nancial capital. The chapters include details of country experiences and results, in some cases analyzed by key protagonists themselves. Collectively, the contributions take a giant step toward reinforcing the power of sovereign states in sectors such as the environment, education, and health. As an authoritative guide to increasing the level of transparency and accountability of private and public economic actors and restoring citizens’ trust in the fairness of our global governance systems, this peerless volume will be warmly welcomed by tax lawyers, taxation authorities, and interested academics worldwide.

There are two largely distinct bodies of literature and corresponding research areas in international taxation. On the one hand, there is the big and continuously growing body of theoretical and empirical literature on tax competition, mainly in the field of economics; on the other, there is a large body of mostly legal literature dealing with international double tax avoidance. Only very few contributions address both issues at the same time. This article narrows this gap. Specifically, we explain why measures of double tax avoidance may actually act as instruments of tax competition. We outline the principles and rules of international double tax avoidance and explain how they can be used for purposes of tax arbitrage. Moreover we outline why double tax avoidance rules can provide an important institutional foundation for tax competition. After that we review the empirical literature suggestive of the role of double tax avoidance rules in tax competition. Finally, we draw some preliminary policy conclusions.

Explains the concepts that underlie international tax law and double tax treaties and provides an insight into how international tax policy, law and practice operate to ultimately impose tax on international business and investment.

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.

In Imposing Standards, Martin Hearson shifts the focus of political rhetoric regarding international tax rules from tax havens and the Global North to the damaging impact of this regime on the Global South. Even when not exploited by tax dodgers, international tax standards place severe limits on the ability of developing countries to tax businesses, denying the Global South access to much-needed revenue. The international rules that allow tax avoidance by multinational corporations have dominated political debate about international tax in the United States and Europe, especially since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. Hearson asks how developing countries willingly gave up their right to tax foreign companies, charting their assimilation into an OECD-led regime from the days of early independence to the present day. Based on interviews with treaty negotiators, policymakers and lobbyists, as well as observation at intergovernmental meetings, archival research, and fieldwork in Africa and Asia, Imposing Standards shows that capacity constraints and imperfect negotiation strategies in developing countries were exploited by capital-exporting states, shielding multinationals from taxation and depriving nations in the Global South of revenue they both need and deserve. Thanks to generous funding from the Gates Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

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.

Income taxation is the fuel and vector of the economic policy of many states. This concise book, destined to students, practitioners and policy makers, explains the issues of taxation of transnational income in a world of sovereign states: how to prevent unjust and inefficient double taxation of the same income, by allocating the tax base between source and residence state and properly allowing in the latter for the tax levied in the former? How to prevent abuse by taxpayers or states, furthering tax evasion or avoidance and causing other but equally significant injustices and inefficiencies? Solutions developed over a century of practice are analyzed. That field of the legal art & science is still young and the paradigm for ideal taxation in the global village of the XXIst century is yet to be invented. An appendix includes the juxtalinear texts of the OECD and UN Model Conventions.

This book is on tax justice and why it is important for peace, human rights, and a more sustainable future. It addresses sixteen different reform proposals that are urgently needed to correct the fault lines in the international tax system as it exists today, and which deprive both developing and developed countries of critical tax resources. It offers clear and concrete ideas on how the reforms can be achieved and why they are important for a more just andequitable global system to prevail.