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.
Many Commonwealth developing countries are potentially affected by the EU and OECD initiatives to regulate international tax competition. These articles by experts from Commonwealth countries discuss the concerns of affected nations, covering globalisation, fiscal sovereignty, WTO issues and more.
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.
ÔThis book is an exceptionally interesting and well-researched analysis of one of the most important reforms in global governance that have been put into place in the wake of the global financial crisis that began in 2007. Eccleston insightfully draws on and contributes to theories of global governance, explaining the surprisingly innovative and successful aspects of the global arrangements for combating tax evasion while also highlighting their deficiencies.Õ Ð Tony Porter, McMaster University, Canada ÔIn the atmosphere of fiscal emergency after the financial crisis, international tax policy has become a critical concern. There is no better guide to inter-linked political and economic challenges that result than Richard EcclestonÕs new book, The Dynamics of Global Economic Governance. Eccleston provides a detailed and authoritative guide to global tax governance after the financial crisis, and makes a highly persuasive case that the current international tax regime is fundamentally flawed in its efforts to combat tax evasion.Õ Ð Jason Sharman, Griffith University, Australia The financial crisis that engulfed global markets in 2008 created an acute need for improved international economic cooperation. Despite the G20Õs prominent coordination role, the regulatory response to the crisis has varied considerably across governance arenas. This book focuses on international taxation and examines how the financial crisis prompted renewed attempts to enhance international tax transparency and confront tax havens. It highlights the complexity of international regime change and the significance of national and financial interests, international organizations, domestic politics and the emerging G20 leaders forum in this process. This timely book highlights the challenges in post-financial crisis global economic governance, information that will strongly appeal to scholars and graduate students in the fields of political science, international political economy, global governance, international taxation and law. Stakeholders in the international tax regime including diplomats and tax administrators, international organizations, NGO and business representatives will also find plenty of enriching information in this study.
This book 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 and equitable global system to prevail. The key to reducing the tax gap and consequent human rights deficit in poor countries is global financial transparency. Such transparency is essential to curbing illicit financial flows that drain less developed countries of capital and tax revenues, and are an impediment to sustainable development. A major break-through for financial transparency is now within reach. The policy reforms outlined in this book not only advance tax justice but also protect human rights by curtailing illegal activity and making available more resources for development. While the reforms are realistic they require both political and an informed and engaged civil society that can put pressure on governments and policy makers to act.
This book analyses the functioning and effectiveness of the diplomatic EU Code of Conduct Group in tackling harmful tax competition in the European Union.
This report presents studies and data available regarding the existence and magnitude of base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), and contains an overview of global developments that have an impact on corporate tax matters.
Small states have learned in recent decades that capital accumulates where taxes are low; as a result, tax havens have increasingly competed for the attention of international investors with tax and regulatory concessions. Economically powerful countries including France, Britain, Japan, and the United States, however, wished to stanch the offshore flow of domestic taxable capital. Since 1998 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has attempted to impose common tax regulations on more than three dozen small states. In a fascinating book based on fieldwork and interviews in twenty-two countries in the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, J. C. Sharman shows how the struggle was decided in favor of the tax havens, which eventually avoided common regulation. No other book on tax havens is based on such extensive fieldwork, and no other author has had access to so many of the key decision makers who played roles in the conflict between onshore and offshore Sharman suggests that microstates succeeded in their struggle with great powers because of their astute deployment of reputation and effective rhetorical self-positioning. In effect, they persuaded a transnational audience that the OECD was being untrue to its own values by engaging in a hypocritical, bullying exercise inimical to free competition.