Tax us, if you can: a game theoretic approach to profit shifting within the European Union

Joana Andrade Vicente

No 2021/0206, Working Papers REM from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, REM, Universidade de Lisboa

Abstract: In this paper we theoretically analyse the European Union’s ongoing political impasse regarding the choice of a single method to allocate multinational enterprises’ profits across countries and we find that this strategic situation resembles a coordination game with distributional consequences. The two Nash equilibria involve no efficiency trade-off (only a movement along the Pareto frontier), but the conflictual distribution of welfare gains and the presence of heterogeneous preferences have been preventing the implementation of a new long-term comprehensive tax policy reform. A unitary taxation approach with formulary apportionment in the European Union is better suited to tackle artificial profit shifting via transfer pricing and would mean an evolutionary change without disrupting the current international tax policy environment. It would restore faith in fairness in the European tax system and allow for further coordination of the transfer pricing policies of the two main international political forces – the United States and the European Union.

Keywords: base erosion and profit shifting; Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base; coordination games; European Union; transfer pricing. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 F23 H25 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-int, nep-ore, nep-pbe and nep-pub
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ise:remwps:wp02062021

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