Why Minimum Corporate Income Taxation Can Make the High-Tax Countries Worse off: the Compliance Dilemma

Jean Hindriks and Yukihiro Nishimura
Additional contact information
Yukihiro Nishimura: Osaka University

No 2021010, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Abstract: Minimum taxation means that if a multinational enterprise (MNE) declares its operations in a jurisdiction taxing less than the minimum tax, the countries where the real economic activity takes place would have the right to tax the difference. There is a revival of the minimum tax standard for two reasons. First, there is concern about the complexity of assigning taxing rights and the effectiveness of profit-splitting rules in eliminating profit shifting. Second, the minimum tax standard has the merit of tackling multinational tax avoidance at its root. However, this argument ignores the strategic interaction between minimum taxation and tax compliance. Building upon Hindriks and Nishimura (2021), we develop a framework in which effective international tax compliance requires enforcement coordination between countries (e.g. exchange of information). We show that under sufficient market asymmetry (translating into the tax differential), minimum taxation may induce the low-tax countries to withdraw from international tax compliance agreements. We then show that such a breakdown of cooperation can make the high-tax country worse off compared to the absence of minimum taxation.

Keywords: profit shifting; tax competition; tax enforcement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 F23 F68 H25 H87 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13
Date: 2021-07-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-gth, nep-isf, nep-iue and nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/en/object/bore ... tastream/PDF_01/view (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Why Minimum Corporate Income Taxation Can Make the High-Tax Countries Worse off: the Compliance Dilemma (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cor:louvco:2021010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alain GILLIS (alain.gillis@uclouvain.be).