Establishing the baseline: estimating the fiscal contribution of multinational enterprises

Richard Bolwijn,, Bruno Casella and Davide Rigo

UNCTAD Transnational Corporations Journal

Abstract: Tax revenues from multinational enterprises (MNEs) are an important source of public finance in developing economies. The research and policy debate so far have mostly focused on the “missing” part, i.e. the government revenues lost due to the tax avoidance practices of MNEs (Bolwijn et al., 2018). In this study, we take a different, but complementary, approach, looking at the taxes and other revenues actually paid by foreign affiliates of MNEs to developing-country governments. We present two alternative methodologies to estimate foreign affiliates’ fiscal contribution – the contribution method and the foreign direct investment (FDI) income method – and show that they lead to the same order of magnitude. The findings allow us to set a baseline for an informed discussion on tax avoidance by MNEs.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/diaeia2018d5a6_en.pdf?repec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Establishing the baseline: estimating the fiscal contribution of multinational enterprises (2018)
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:unc:tncjou:23

Access Statistics for this article

UNCTAD Transnational Corporations Journal is currently edited by Kumi Endo

More articles in UNCTAD Transnational Corporations Journal from United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kumi Endo ().