International corporate tax issues are now prominent in public debate, most notably with the current G20-OECD project addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting ('BEPS'). But, while there is considerable empirical evidence for advanced countries on the cross-country fiscal externalities at the heart of these issues, there is almost none for developing countries. This paper uses panel data for 173 countries over 33 years to explore the magnitude and nature of international fiscal externalities, with a particular focus on developing countries and applying a new method enabling a distinguishing between spillover effects through real investment decisions and through avoidance techniques-and quantification of the revenue impact of the latter. The results suggest that spillover effects on the tax base are substantially larger in developing countries than in advanced, and that they imply a likely loss of revenue from BEPS that is both substantially larger for them.

International corporate tax issues are now prominent in public debate, most notably with the current G20-OECD project addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting ('BEPS'). But, while there is considerable empirical evidence for advanced countries on the crosscountry fiscal externalities at the heart of these issues, there is almost none for developing countries. This paper uses panel data for 173 countries over 33 years to explore the magnitude and nature of international fiscal externalities, with a particular focus on developing countries and applying a new method enabling a distinguishing between spillover effects through real investment decisions and through avoidance techniques-and quantification of the revenue impact of the latter. The results suggest that spillover effects on the tax base are substantially larger in developing countries than in advanced, and that they imply a likely loss of revenue from BEPS that is both substantially larger for them.

This paper uses a newly constructed revenue dataset of 35 resource-rich countries for the period 1992-2009 to analyze the impact of expanding resource revenues on different types of domestic (non resource) tax revenues. Overall, we find a statistically significant negative relationship between resource revenues and total domestic (non resource) revenues, including for the major tax components. For each additional percentage point of GDP in resource revenues, there is a reduction in domestic (non resource) revenues of about 0.3 percentage points of GDP. We find this primarily occurs through reduced effort on taxes on goods and services-in particular, the VAT-followed by a smaller negative impact on corporate income and trade taxes.

This paper reexamines the relationship between aid and domestic tax revenues using a more recent and comprehensive dataset covering 118 countries for the period 1980-2009. Overall, our results support earlier findings of a negative association between net Official Development Assistance (ODA) and domestic tax revenues, but this relationship appears to have weakened in reflection of greater efforts at mobilizing domestic revenues in many countries. The composition of net ODA matters: ODA grants are associated with lower revenues, while ODA loans are not. The paper further finds that net ODA and grants are negatively associated with VAT, excise and income tax revenues, but have a positive relationship with trade taxes. Aid has a particularly strong negative effect on domestic tax revenues in low-income countries and incountries with relatively weak institutions.

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