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 paper reviews capital taxation issues in Italy based on a comprehensive definition encompassing taxes on income, transactions, and ownership. It discusses options to enhance the neutrality of the capital income tax system, followed by a detailed analysis of the property tax, the inheritance tax, and various transaction taxes. The paper also examines the case for replacing the set of existing taxes on financial and real assets with a single net wealth tax.
This paper describes how growing economic integration within the European Community increases the scope for any one EC country to impose adverse externalities on other member countries by manipulating its capital income taxes. After examining several alternatives to concerted tax harmonization, the paper concludes that there is a need to harmonize capital income taxes within the EC as the Community moves toward a unified market with free capital movements and fixed nominal exchange rates. The harmonization process could start by agreeing on the tax base, followed by setting minimum statutory rates.
Why are tax systems so complex? What are the causes of tax law complexity? What are the consequences? Why is tax simplification so difficult to achieve? These, and related questions, lie at the core of this volume on tax simplification featuring chapters by leading tax experts around the world. The quest for simplicity è^' or at least some move towards simplification è^' has been a fixation of governments and others for many years, but little appears to have been achieved. Tax simplification is the most widely quoted but the least widely observed of the usually stated goals of policy (equity and efficiency being the others). It has been used (and abused) as a primary justification for tax reform over the last century, and typically it is seen as è^-a good thingè^-- è^' to say that one is in favour of tax simplification is tantamount to stating that one is in favour of good as opposed to evil.
Presents the recent trends in the taxation of corporate income in OECD countries, discusses the main drivers of corporate income tax reform and evaluates the gains of fundamental corporate tax reform.
Building on previous FAD work in the tax administration field, this paper defines broad criteria for diagnosing the problems in a country’s tax administration and formulating an appropriate reform strategy. To be effective, this strategy should be based on the size of the tax gap and the country’s particular circumstances. This paper discusses some guiding principles which have provided the basis for successful reforms, including: reducing the tax system’s complexity, encouraging taxpayers’ voluntary compliance, differentiating the treatment of taxpayers by their revenue potential, and ensuring the reform’s effective management. Also discussed are specific bottlenecks that hinder the effectiveness of the tax administration’s operations.
Interest in corporate tax reform that lowers the rate and broadens the base has developed in the past several years. Some discussions by economists in opinion pieces have suggested there is an urgent need to lower the corporate tax rate, but not necessarily to broaden the tax base, an approach that presents some difficulties given current budget pressures. Others see the corporate tax as a potential source of revenue. Arguments for lowering the corporate tax rate include the traditional concerns about economic distortions arising from the corporate tax and newer concerns arising from the increasingly global nature of the economy. Some claims have been made that lowering the corporate tax rate would raise revenue because of the behavioral responses, an effect that is linked to an open economy. Although the corporate tax has generally been viewed as contributing to a more progressive tax system because the burden falls on capital income and thus on higher-income individuals, claims have also been made that the burden falls not on owners of capital, but on labor income. The analysis in this report suggests that many of the concerns expressed about the corporate tax are not supported by empirical evidence. Claims that behavioral responses could cause revenues to rise if rates were cut do not hold up on either a theoretical or an empirical basis. Studies that purport to show a revenue-maximizing corporate tax rate of 30% (a rate lower than the current statutory tax rate) contain econometric errors that lead to biased and inconsistent results; when those problems are corrected the results disappear. Cross-country studies to provide direct evidence showing that the burden of the corporate tax actually falls on labor yield unreasonable results and prove to suffer from econometric flaws that also lead to a disappearance of the results when corrected, in those cases where data were obtained and the results replicated. Many studies that have been cited are not relevant to the United States because they reflect wage bargaining approaches and unions have virtually disappeared from the private sector in the United States. Overall, the evidence suggests that the tax is largely borne by capital. Similarly, claims that high U.S. tax rates will create problems for the United States in a global economy suffer from a misrepresentation of the U.S. tax rate compared with other countries and are less important when capital is imperfectly mobile, as it appears to be. Although these new arguments appear to rely on questionable methods, the traditional concerns about the corporate tax appear valid. While an argument may be made that the tax is still needed as a backstop to individual tax collections, it does result in some economic distortions. These economic distortions, however, have declined substantially over time as corporate rates and shares of output have fallen. Moreover, it is difficult to lower the corporate tax without creating a way of sheltering individual income given the low tax rates on dividends and capital gains. A number of revenue-neutral changes are available that could reduce these distortions, allow for a lower corporate statutory tax rate, and lead to a more efficient corporate tax system. These changes include base broadening, reducing the benefits of debt finance through inflation indexing, taxing large pass-through firms as corporations, and reducing the tax at the firm level offset by an increase at the individual level. Nevertheless, the scope for reducing the tax rate in a revenue-neutral way may be limited.
