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 …

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 …

Stock Market Reactions To India's 2016 Demonetization., Vikramaditya S. Khanna, Dhammika Dharmapala

Articles

On November 8, 2016, the Indian government made a surprise announcement that certain currency notes (representing 86 percent of the currency then in circulation) would no longer be legal tender (although they could be deposited in banks over a limited period). The stated reason for this sudden “demonetization” was to combat tax evasion and corruption associated with “unaccounted for” cash. We compute abnormal returns for different subsamples of firms—defined by industry, ownership structure, and other characteristics—on the Indian stock market around this event. There is little evidence that sectors thought to be associated with greater tax evasion or corruption experienced …

Complete Distributive Rules And The Single Tax Principle: A Review Of Recent Italian Case Law, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Gianluca Mazzoni

Articles

The authors, in this article, examine the application of complete distributive rules as set out in various tax treaties as it relates to the single tax principle by reference to recent Italian case law.

On 11 October 2018, in Decision No. 25219, the Italian Corte Suprema di Cassazione (Supreme Court, CSC) confirmed that treaty provisions limiting the exercise of the domestic power to tax by the source state also apply where the residence state does not actually tax the relevant item of income. In that case, where a tax treaty attributes exclusive tax jurisdiction over an item of income to …

Review Of The Making Of Tax Law: The Development Of The Swedish Tax System, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Reviews

Imagine that a single person had been responsible for all U.S. tax reforms enacted from 1974 to 2012. That was the position of Sven-Olof Lodin, the former president of the International Fiscal Association. For more than 40 years, professor Lodin was the most influential voice in Swedish tax policy. This was not in a single, official governmental capacity, but rather as a member of more than 20 government commissions and working parties on taxation, which were responsible for all the major changes in Swedish tax law in recent decades, including the "Tax Reform of the Century" in 1991. In this …

Comparative Tax Law: Theory And Practice, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Guy Inbar, Omri Marian, Linneu Mello

Articles

On 3 October 2009, a Conference on Comparative Tax Law in Theory and Practice took place at the University of Michigan Law School. It was organized by Reuven Avi-Yonah (Professor, University of Michigan Law School) and Mathias Reimann (Editor, American Journal of Comparative Law and Professor, University of Michigan Law School), and was attended by Hugh Ault (Professor of Law, Boston College Law School), Victor Thuronyi (Senior Counsel, International Monetary Fund), Brian Arnold (Professor Emeritus, University of Western Ontario), William Barker (Professor, The Dickinson School of Law, Penn State), Michael Livingston (Professor, Rutgers School of Law-Camden), Carlo Garbarino (Professor of …

Rethinking Treaty Shopping: Lessons For The European Union, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, C. H. Panayi

Book Chapters

Whilst treaty shopping is not a new phenomenon, it remains as controversial as ever. It would seem that the more countries try to deal with it, the wider the disagreements as to what is improper treaty shopping and what is legitimate tax planning. In this paper, we reassess the traditional quasi-definitions of treaty shopping in an attempt to delineate the contours of such practices. We examine the various theoretical arguments advanced to justify the campaign against treaty shopping. We also consider the current trends in treaty shopping and the anti-treaty shopping policies under the OECD Model and the US Model. …

International Capital Taxation., Rachel Griffith, James R. Hines Jr., Peter Birch Sørensen

Book Chapters

Globalization carries profound implications for tax systems, yet most tax systems, including that of the UK, still retain many features more suited to closed economies. The purpose of this chapter is to assess how tax policy should reflect the changing international economic environment. Institutional barriers to the movement of goods, services, capital, and (to a lesser extent) labour have fallen dramatically since the Meade Report (Meade, 1978) was published. So have the costs of moving both real activity and taxable profits between tax jurisdictions. These changes mean that capital and taxable profits in particular are more mobile between jurisdictions than …

Introduction To Comparative Fiscal Federalism: Comparing The European Court Of Justice And The Us Supreme Court's Tax Jurisprudence, James R. Hines Jr.

Other Publications

This volume brings together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic to consider federalist tax jurisprudence as practiced in Europe and the United States. These essays display a broad range of shared concerns, which is not to say that the scholars agree on all points of substantive policy and interpretation. What can be said is that there is general agreement that the exercise of comparing the tax jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice and the US Supreme Court is likely to be informative and beneficial to all concerned.

Taxing Consumption And Other Sins, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

Federal and state governments in the United States use income and payroll taxes as their primary tools to collect revenue. In the rest of the world, governments also use income and payroll taxes, but rely much more heavily than does the United States on taxing consumption. Consumption taxes take many forms, including general sales taxes, value-added taxes, and excise taxes on the consumption of specific items including gasoline, alcohol, tobacco products, firearms, air travel, telephone communication, and others. The U.S. government does not use a value-added tax, making the United States unique among high-income countries and a rarity in the …

Preface To Comparative Fiscal Federalism: Comparing The European Court Of Justice And The Us Supreme Court's Tax Jurisprudence, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Other Publications

In October 2005, a group of distinguished tax experts from both the European Union and the United States convened at the University of Michigan Law School for a conference on 'Comparative Fiscal Federalism: Comparing the US Supreme Court and European Court of Justice Tax Jurisprudence.' The conference was sponsored by the Law School, the European Union Center, and Harvard Law School's Fund for Tax and Fiscal Research. Attendees from Europe included Michel Au jean, the principal tax official at the EU Commission, Servaas van Thiel, chief tax advisor to the EU Council, Michael Lang (Vienna) and Kees van Raad (Leiden), …

Comparative Fiscal Federalism: What Can The U.S. Supreme Court And The European Court Of Justice Learn From Each Other's Tax Jurisprudence?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In October 2005, a group of distinguished tax experts from the European Union and the United States, who had never met before, convened at the University of Michigan Law School for a conference on "Comparative Fiscal Federalism: Comparing the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Justice Tax Jurisprudence." The purpose of the conference was to shed comparative light on the very different approaches taken by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the U.S. Supreme Court to the question of fiscal federalism. The conference was sponsored by the U-M Law School, U-M's European Union Center, and Harvard Law School's …