Why Do Most Countries Set High Tax Rates on Capital?
نویسندگان
چکیده
We consider tax competition in a world with tax bases exhibiting different degrees of mobility, modeled as mobile and immobile capital. An agreement among countries not to give preferential treatment to mobile capital results in an equilibrium where mobile capital is nevertheless taxed relatively lightly. In particular, one or two of the smallest countries, measured by their stocks of immobile capital, choose relatively low tax rates, thereby attracting mobile capital away from the other countries, which are then left to set revenue maximizing taxes on their immobile capital. This conclusion holds regardless of whether countries choose their tax policies sequentially or simultaneously. In contrast, unrestricted competition for mobile capital results in the preferential treatment of mobile capital by all countries, without cross-country differences in the taxation of mobile capital. Nevertheless our main result is that the non-preferential regime generates larger global tax revenue, despite the sizable revenue loss from the emergence of low-tax countries. By extending the analysis to include crosscountry differences in productivities, we are able to resurrect a case for preferential regimes, but only if the productivity differences are sufficiently large.
منابع مشابه
State Capacity, Capital Mobility, and Tax Competition
Abstract The theory of international tax competition suggests that governments attempt to attract mobile capital bases by undercutting the foreign capital tax rate. An analysis of the role that state capacity plays in tax policymaking under international pressures is, however, missing. The central contribution of our study is to highlight the importance of the interaction between state capaci...
متن کاملCapital Gains Tax and Housing Price Bubble: A Cross-Country Study
P olicy makers in housing sector seeks to use instruments by which they can control volatility of housing price and prevent high disturbances of the bubble and price shocks, or at least, reduce them. In the portfolio and speculation theories, it is emphasized that speculative demand for housing is the main cause of shocks and price volatilities in the sector. The theory of housing price bu...
متن کاملGrowth in the Shadow of Expropriation∗
In this paper, we address two questions: (i) Why do developing countries with the highest growth rates export capital; and (ii) Why are some countries unable or unwilling to pursue the high growth/low debt strategies that has proven successful for many “miracle” economies. The model we study is a small open economy subject to political economy and contracting frictions. The political economy fr...
متن کاملCapital Taxation May Survive in Open Economies
Why do capital taxes still exist in an integrated world economy? When capital is perfectly mobile across countries and labour is fixed, a source-based tax on capital both reduces and redistributes world income. In a simple general equilibrium model we show that under plausible circumstances there always exists a country that benefits from introducing such a tax. Countries that are richer in ter...
متن کاملInternational Taxation
The integration of world capital markets carries important implications for the design and impact of tax policies. This paper evaluates research findings on international taxation, drawing attention to connections and inconsistencies between theoretical and empirical observations. Diamond and Mirrlees (1971) note that small open economies incur very high costs in attempting to tax the returns t...
متن کامل