Comparative and Foreign Law Commons^™

After Pillar One, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

Pillar One is unlikely to succeed for three reasons. First, it requires an MTC to be implemented because Amount A requires overriding Articles 5 (Permanent Establishment, PE), 7 (Business Profits) and 9 (Associated Enterprises) of every tax treaty to abolish the PE and Arm’s Length Principle (ALP) limits enshrined therein. But negotiating an MTC is hard, especially when over 100 countries are involved and there are fundamental disagreements among them.

Second, because Pillar One (despite its October 2021 expansion) is still aimed primarily at taxing the US digital giants (Big Tech), it is hard to envisage it being implemented without …

Lower-Income Countries’ Ongoing Quest For International Tax Justice: A Case Study Of The Oecd’S Tax Allocation Proposal, Okanga Ogbu Okanga, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The viability of our international tax system hinges on two things: (1) safeguarding the effective flow of international activities and (2) ensuring that countries can adequately collect tax on the income derived from those activities. Each of these fundamentals relies on a defensible/fair allocation of taxing rights between countries with competing tax jurisdiction (inter-nation equity).

The recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-led multilateral effort to transform international tax rules to ensure that countries can adequately tax multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in the global digital economy (OECD proposal) has reignited inter-nation equity conversations. Although important to all countries, inter-nation …

A New Framework For Digital Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Young Ran (Christine) Kim, Karen Sam

Law & Economics Working Papers

The international tax regime has wide implications for business, trade, and the international political economy. Under current law, multinational enterprises do not pay their fair share of taxes to market countries where profits are generated because market countries are only allowed to tax companies with a physical presence there. Digital companies, like Google and Amazon, can operate entirely online, thereby avoiding market country taxes. Multinationals can also exploit existing tax rules by shifting their profits to low-tax jurisdictions, thereby avoiding taxes in the residence country where their headquarters are located.

Recently, a global tax deal was reached to tackle these …

Transfer Pricing: The Cup -- Case Studies: Australia, Us, Uk, Norway And Canada, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Andrew Shact

Faculty Scholarship

All transfer pricing regimes give priority to the comparable uncontrolled price (CUP) method. Despite declarations that transfer pricing is a search for the “best method” or “most appropriate method,” all systems concede that the search is over when an exact comparable is found because a CUP is preferred over all methods. The best CUP is an exact CUP because it provides an arm’s length price that is not calculated. The price emerges directly from the comparison.

CUPs have traditionally been the most commonly applied method for both taxpayers and the government. They are the judicial gold standard. They hold sway …

It-Apas - Vertical Harmonization Of Transfer - Pricing Standards, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

The World Customs Organization (WCO) and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have begun considering the harmonization of transfer pricing norms among income tax, customs and VAT regimes. Two conferences have been organized in May of 2006 and 2007.

These conferences have concluded so far: (a) that more analysis is needed; (b) that harmonization will require adjustments on all sides; and (c) that pilot projects (real world statutory and administrative efforts to harmonize) or case studies in harmonization (hypothetical fact patterns) are needed to facilitate consideration. This paper assesses the three basic paths being pursued at the present …

Domestic Subsidies Under The Wto Agreement On Subsidies And Countervailing Measures And Their Treatment In Section 771 Of The Tariff Act Of 1930, Cecil Carl-Erich Kramer

LLM Theses and Essays

Governments provide subsidies for a variety of reasons and they are an important tool "to promote important objectives of national policy. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is comprised of industrialized countries, all of which are Members of the OECD Convention also have shown a steady rise in the provision of subsidies. The policy behind the fact that subsidies are addressed in international agreements is that they create a distortion in international trade and that they can quickly and destructively spread from nation to nation. They create a disparity between the actual costs incurred in producing a particular …