The OECD proposal offers piecemeal fixes
This kind of tax avoidance has become an art form at which the cleverest firms, like Apple, excel. The aggregate costs of such practices are enormous. According to the International Monetary Fund, governments lose at least $500 billion per year as a result of corporate tax shifting. And Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues estimate that some 40% of overseas profits made by US multinationals are transferred to tax havens. In 2018, 60 of the 500 largest companies – including Amazon, Netflix, and General Motors – paid no US tax, despite reporting joint profits (on a global basis) of some $80 billion. These trends are having a devastating impact on national tax revenues and undermining the public’s sense of fairness. […] Given the scale of the problem, it is clear that we need a global minimum tax to end the current race to the bottom.
No More Half-Measures on Corporate Taxes
By: Joseph Stiglitz – Columbia University
The OECD proposal introduces many distortions
- The proposal to-date represents complex, ambiguous and uncertainty rich set of taxation reforms that pose serious questions about their potential effectiveness and impact on the advanced economies;
- The proposal represents a direct challenge to the national sovereignty over taxation and fiscal policies, including policies aimed at domestic economic development, support for the free capital mobility and promotion of the research and innovation-intensive growth.
OECD-Led Tax Reforms: A Prescription for a Less Competitive Economy
Author: Constantin Gurdgiev
From: Trinity College, Dublin
