A Strange Alchemy: Embedding Human Rights in Tax Policy Spillover Assessments

Lusiani, Nicholas; Cosgrove, Mary

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3218597

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 37 publications

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“…Yet, using widely-accepted human rights norms can help arrive at the right questions to ask when developing proposals to allocate tax rights between jurisdictions or tackle tax avoidance,questions that might form the basis of a human rights impact assessment of proposals to re-write the international tax rules. 99 For our purposes, international human rights law can be defined as socio-political claims founded on the inherent dignity of people, and the resulting foundational obligations of government to uphold human dignity. These claims have increasingly been codified in national, regional and international law through an extensive process of negotiation and interpretation within and between countries.…”

Section: Human Rights Norms and Questions To Assess The Adequacy And Impact Of International Tax Rulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Re-righting the international tax rules: operationalising human rights in the struggle to tax multinational companies

Schutter

Lusiani

Chaparro

2020

The International Journal of Human Rights

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Who finances government, and how, is foundational to realising human rights for all, without discrimination. This is especially pertinent during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is only exacerbating health and economic disparities. This article reviews what a national human rights-aligned tax policy would look like, and then dissects how the international tax rules currently impede individual States, and particularly low-and middle-income countries, to bring their national tax policies in line with human rights. The authors then discuss how international human rights law, including the UN Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments of Economic Reforms, can provide a stronger normative foundation to curb harmful tax competition and help resolve disputes over the right to tax multinational companies. Given the paucity of practical tools to embed human rights norms into the process and substance of reforming international tax policies, the authors then develop a set of assessment questions to help operationalise human rights norms into current efforts to re-write the international tax rules.

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Section: Human Rights Norms and Questions To Assess The Adequacy And Impact Of International Tax Rulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Re-righting the international tax rules: operationalising human rights in the struggle to tax multinational companies

Schutter

Lusiani

Chaparro

2020

The International Journal of Human Rights

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Negative Spillovers in International Corporate Taxation and the European Union

Ateş

Harari²,

Meinzer³

2021

United Nations University Series on Regionalism

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Jurisdictions can engage in different types of aggressive tax policies to varying degrees. These policies can have negative spillover effects on other jurisdictions. In the realm of corporate taxation, these effects consist of base erosion and profit shifting and perceived pressures to reduce corporate taxes. Both direct and indirect effects undermine the efforts especially of developing countries at mobilising domestic resources to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. We analyse the intensity of corrosive tax policies by exploiting a new legal dataset compiled for the Corporate Tax Haven Index (CTHI). Relying on rigorously defined indicators, the dataset allows comparative analyses of negative and positive spillover pathways in the corporate income tax systems of 64 jurisdictions. Tax policies under review comprise, for example, preferential tax regimes, extremely low tax rates agreed through secretive tax rulings, economic zones and tax holidays. Comparing the 27 European Union (EU) member states with five African developing countries, we find important differences. Except for two indicators (loss utilisation and economic zones/tax holidays), the European Union members are found to consistently engage in more aggressive corporate tax policies than the African countries. These heightened risks for negative spillovers emanating from the EU27 corporate tax rules stand in conflict with the stated intentions by the European Union to support good governance in tax matters and its commitment to ensure policy coherence for development. The chapter provides recommendations on how to reduce the risks for negative spillovers in corporate taxation and to exit the race to the bottom in corporate taxation.

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Illicit Financial Flows: Concepts and Definition

Musselli¹,

Bonanomi²

2019

poldev

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A Strange Alchemy: Embedding Human Rights in Tax Policy Spillover Assessments

Cited by 3 publications

References 37 publications

Re-righting the international tax rules: operationalising human rights in the struggle to tax multinational companies

Re-righting the international tax rules: operationalising human rights in the struggle to tax multinational companies

Negative Spillovers in International Corporate Taxation and the European Union

Illicit Financial Flows: Concepts and Definition

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