Fiscal Studies最新文献

In this paper, I provide a high-level, non-technical review of how accounting information is used in Pillar 2 and what this means for the tax base. In addition, I discuss potential problems of using accounting data explicitly in a minimum tax and then, specifically, as the starting point for the computation of the income measures in Pillar 2. I then discuss several alternative solutions that may be simpler – or at least no more complex – and, importantly, pose fewer problems in terms of the quality of financial accounting information and the information available to capital markets.

I present a simplification safe harbour based on tax administrative guidance for Pillar Two, the global minimum tax, developed together with Cedric Döllefeld, Joachim Englisch, Simon Harst and Felix Siegel. It aims at reducing unnecessary compliance costs by avoiding effective tax rate (ETR) calculations if a minimum tax of 15 per cent has already been paid. The simplification safe harbour consists of a two-level test to determine if a full GloBE ETR calculation is required from a multinational enterprise (MNE) or if a simplified ETR calculation or no calculation at all is sufficient. The test consists of a country-level test and – only if necessary – an MNE-level test. The country-level test assesses a country's tax system. It seeks to determine whether the national tax system's nominal tax rates are (too) low and whether significant deviations between a country's tax base and the GloBE income exist. The second level, the MNE-level test, is only carried out if the country-level test has identified potential ‘red flags’. Even if this second test is required, the simplification safe harbour offers a significant reduction in compliance costs. This reduction is achieved by relying on national tax data, which are readily available in firms, instead of highly adjusted accounting data.

This paper presents empirical evidence on the proposed global minimum tax (GMT) of the OECD's Pillar 2. First, it addresses how many, and which, countries or country groups can be seen as constituting a ‘critical mass’ for its successful implementation; given such a critical mass, remaining jurisdictions worldwide will have an incentive to implement the GMT as well. Second, it assesses the generosity of the substance-based income exclusion (SBIE), which is informative for the revenue collected under the GMT.

Pillar 2 of the OECD's global tax reform proposal will have significant direct and indirect impacts for low-income developing countries (LICs). Most interesting and problematic is the question as to how the global anti-base erosion (GloBE) rules for a proposed global minimum effective tax will affect tax competition behaviour in LICs, and how LICs should respond when a critical mass of higher-income economies adopt the new structure. Most LICs are source-only countries, and they are very much in competition to attract foreign direct investment. Do LICs want to continue to compete using the tax system to the extent possible, to step back from that competition, or to take some intermediate course? Pillar 2 does not itself change a country's desired position on the competition spectrum – it merely affects how, and to what extent, that position can still be obtained. This paper posits that LICs should adopt qualified domestic minimum top-up taxes, and that this will not itself have a negative impact on their competitiveness. The primary focus of the paper, however, is on the design of the substance-based income exclusion (carve-out), examining the following three questions. Should the GloBE have been designed without a carve-out? Would there have been a better way of designing it? How will LICs be affected? The paper concludes that, as little real advantage is likely to accrue to LICs from intangible assets, minimising tax competition for those assets will have relatively little impact on them; and that, from an economic efficiency standpoint, shifting the tax burden away from a normal return and toward economic rents – albeit imperfectly – is a reasonable solution.

This paper proposes an alternative methodology to assess fiscal sustainability. Our balance-sheet approach (BSA) relies on estimating separately all of a government's assets and liabilities as opposed to focusing only on the burden of explicit liabilities. In our approach, assets are primarily the present discounted value of taxes, and liabilities include explicit liabilities but also the present discounted value of expenditures. Using the value of assets and liabilities, we compute the government's balance sheet, and therefore net worth. We then evaluate the response of net worth to growth, commodity prices or real exchange rate shocks. By computing a value for the government's net worth, our methodology allows an assessment of fiscal sustainability that is less reliant on the analyst's assumptions than traditional debt sustainability analysis (DSA).

We examine value added tax (VAT) non-compliance in the European Union (EU) car market. This issue is of paramount importance because of the loss of VAT revenue, the profound distortion of market mechanisms, and the dangerous variety of fraudulent schemes employed. In addition to the usual VAT fraudulent schemes on intra-community trade, the special regimes, and the different regulations for the sale of motor vehicles in the EU member states per se, favour non-compliance in the car market. Non-compliance also takes advantage of the lack of adequate and prompt information exchange among the tax administrations of different countries and, within each country, between the tax administrations and their departments responsible for motor vehicles. We highlight the fact that the current measures are insufficient to fight VAT non-compliance and that the new rules proposed in the ‘definitive VAT system’ are inadequate to control the proliferation of scams in the car market. Accordingly, we suggest more substantial measures: well-targeted and prompt cross-checks through archives and databases, and the monitoring of their effectiveness; electronic invoices; real-time exchanges of information between the different tax and transport authorities; and increased harmonisation of the special VAT schemes that aim to eliminate one of the most exploited opportunities for illicit gain, to the detriment of the EU member states.

The increasing flow of immigrants into Europe over the last decade has generated a range of considerations in the policy agenda of many receiving countries. One of the main considerations for policymakers and public opinion alike is whether immigrants contribute their ‘fair’ share to their host country's tax and welfare system. In this paper, we assess the net fiscal impact of intra-EU and extra-EU migration in 27 European Union (EU) Member States. We find that migrants in the EU, on average, contribute more than natives to welfare states. However, when we take an age-specific life-cycle perspective, we find that natives generally show a higher net fiscal contribution than both groups of migrants. Among migrants, extra-EU migrants contribute less than intra-EU migrants. We then use a demographic microsimulation model to project the potential net fiscal impact of migration in the EU into the future. We show that despite the fact that intra-EU migration contributes to reduce the strong negative impact of population ageing, its contribution is not sufficient to offset the negative fiscal consequences.

This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the division of labour between parents of school-aged children in two-parent opposite-gender families. In line with existing evidence, we find that mothers’ paid work took a larger hit than that of fathers, and that mothers spent substantially longer doing childcare and housework than their partners. We go further to show that these gender differences cannot be explained by gender differences in the industries and occupations in which parents worked prior to the lockdown. Nor can they be explained by gender differences in earnings prior to the crisis: independently of which parent earned the most before the pandemic, it tended to be the mothers who adjusted time spent on paid and unpaid work more significantly. This is the case even in households where only one partner remained active in paid work. While we cannot fully rule out that these asymmetric responses are explained by gender differences in productivity in domestic work, our results do suggest that other factors, such as gender norms, may play an important role.