The tax rules of the United States and other countries have intended and unintended effects on the operations of multinational corporations, influencing everything from the formation and allocation of capital to competitive strategies. The growing importance of international business has led economists to reconsider whether current systems of taxing international income are viable in a world of significant capital market integration and global commercial competition. In an attempt to quantify the effect of tax policy on international investment choices, this volume presents in-depth analyses of the interaction of international tax rules and the investment decisions of multinational enterprises. Ten papers assess the role played by multinational firms and their investment in the U.S. economy and the design of international tax rules for multinational investment; analyze channels through which international tax rules affect the costs of international business activities; and examine ways in which international tax rules affect financing decisions of multinational firms. As a group, the papers demonstrate that international tax rules have significant effects on firms' investment and other financing decisions.
Because the actions of multinational corporations have a clear and direct effect on the flow of capital throughout the world, how and why these firms behave the way they do is a major issue for national governments and their policymakers. With an unprecedented ability to adjust the scale, character, and location of their global operations, international corporations have become increasingly sensitive to the kind and degree of tax obligations imposed on them by both host and home countries. Tax rules affect the volume of foreign direct investment, corporate borrowing, transfer pricing, dividend and royalty payments, and research and development. National governments that tax the profits of international firms face important challenges in designing tax policies to attract them. This collection examines the global ramifications of tax policies, offering up-to-date, theoretically innovative, and empirically sound perspectives on a problem of immense significance to future economic growth around the globe.
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.
Eden examines how transfer pricing has been handled in different disciplines, including international business, economics, accounting, law and public policy.
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.
The six papers in this vohune represent state-of-the-art empirical and conceptual research on various aspects of the taxation of multinational corporations. They were commissioned for and presented at a conference organized by Price Waterhouse LLP on behalf of the International Tax Policy Forum, held in Washington, DC in March, 1994. The ftrst four papers were originally published in the May, 1995 issue of International Tax and Public Finance. The Slemrod paper appeared in the Policy Watch Section of the November, 1995 issue of that journal. The foregoing papers were subject to the normal refereeing procedures of the journal, and the summaries that follow are drawn from there. The Leamer paper has not been previously published. Altshuler and Mintz examine one aspect of the 1986 u. s. Tax Reform Act --the change in the rules for the allocation of interest expense between domestic-(U. S. ) and foreign-source income. In the absence of rules, a parent with excess credits could reduce U. S. tax liability by allocating interest expense toward itself; thus reducing its taxable domestic income without any compensating increase in either the U. S. tax due on foreign-source income or the foreign tax due (which is independent of U. S. rules).
The international tax system is in dire need of reform. It allows multinational companies to shift profits to low tax jurisdictions and thus reduce their global effective tax rates. A major international project, launched in 2013, aimed to fix the system, but failed to seriously analyse the fundamental aims and rationales for the taxation of multinationals' profit, and in particular where profit should be taxed. As this project nears its completion, it is becomingincreasingly clear that the fundamental structural weaknesses in the system will remain. This book, produced by a group of economists and lawyers, adopts a different approach and starts from first principles in order to generate an international tax system fit for the 21st century. This approach examines fundamental issues of principle and practice in the taxation of business profit and the allocation of taxing rights over such profit amongst countries, paying attention to the interests and circumstances of advanced and developing countries. Once this conceptual framework is developed, the book evaluates the existing system and potential reform options against it. A number of reform options are considered, ranging from those requiring marginal change to radically different systems. Some options have been discussed widely. Others, particularly Residual Profit Split systems and a Destination Based Cash-Flow Tax, are more innovative and have been developed at some length and in depth for the first time in this book. Their common feature is that they assign taxing rights partly/fully to the location of relatively immobile factors: shareholders or consumers.
The Allocation of Multinational Business Income: Reassessing the Formulary Apportionment Option Edited by Richard Krever & François Vaillancourt Although arm’s length methodology continues to prevail in international taxation policy, it has long been replaced by the formulary apportionment method at the subnational level in a few federal countries. Its use is planned for international profit allocation as an element of the European Union’s CCCTB proposals. In this timely book – a global guide to formulary apportionment, both as it exists in practice and how it might function internationally – a knowledgeable group of contributors from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, address this actively debated topic, both in respect of its technical aspects and its promise as a global response to the avoidance, distortions, and unfairness of current allocation systems. Drawing on a wealth of literature considering formulary apportionment in the international sphere and considering decades of experience with the system in the states and provinces of the United States and Canada, the contributors explicate and examine such pertinent issues as the following: the debate about what factors should be used to allocate profits under a formulary apportionment system and experience in jurisdictions using formulary apportionment; application of formulary apportionment in specific sectors such as digital enterprises and the banking industry; the political economy of establishing and maintaining a successful formulary apportionment regime; formulary apportionment proposals for Europe; the role of traditional tax criteria such as economic efficiency, fairness, ease of administration, and robustness to avoidance and incentive compatibility; determining which parts of a multinational group are included in a formulary apportionment unit; and whether innovative profit-split methodologies such as those developed by China are shifting traditional arm’s length methods to a quasi-formulary apportionment system. Providing a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of the formulary apportionment option, this state of the art summary of history, current practice, proposals and prospects in the ongoing debate over arm’s length versus formulary apportionment methodologies will be welcomed by practitioners, policy-makers, and academics concerned with international taxation, all of whom will gain an understanding of the case put forward by proponents for adoption of formulary apportionment in Europe and globally and the counter-arguments they face. Readers will acquire a better understanding of the implications of formulary apportionment and its central role in the current debate about the future of international taxation rules. “...providing (sic) all the intellectual ammunition needed to carefully re-examine one of the ideas traditionally considered as apocryphal by the OECD and to a significant portion of the tax professional community...readers of this book will come away not only with a renewed understanding of the multiple facets of formulary apportionment, but also of some of the fundamental pressure points in the international tax system. Accordingly, it is a welcome and timely addition to the literature. ” Dr. Stjepan Gadžo, Assistant Professor at University of Rijeka, Faculty of Law / British Tax Review 2021, Issue 2, p243-246
This paper reviews the rapidly growing empirical literature on international tax avoidance by multinational corporations. It surveys evidence on main channels of corporate tax avoidance including transfer mispricing, international debt shifting, treaty shopping, tax deferral and corporate inversions. Moreover, it performs a meta analysis of the extensive literature that estimates the overall size of profit shifting. We find that the literature suggests that, on average, a 1 percentage-point lower corporate tax rate will expand before-tax income by 1 percent—an effect that is larger than reported as the consensus estimate in previous surveys and tends to be increasing over time. The literature on tax avoidance still has several unresolved puzzles and blind spots that require further research.
