Objective
The proposed research seeks to determine how international tax arrangements could advance global wealth redistribution in a world of enhanced economic integration. Globalisation has placed traditional income tax systems under siege as domestic tax regimes fail to coordinate their actions to effectively tax cross border transactions. Furthermore, even though global markets operate in a world characterized by tremendous poverty and inequality, the international taxation literature rarely directly addresses issues of global distributive justice. If taxation is the price for civilization, then the burden of addressing issues of international taxation is the price for globalisation. The proposed research would stress that while international taxation may indeed be a cost of globalization, it is also a potentially powerful instrument to promote more just global market arrangements. To demonstrate this point, the proposal advances two related strands of research. The first strand would determine how international tax arrangements should be structured to take distributive considerations into account. Taxes involve big money, and therefore allocating the right-to-tax among nations has a distributional impact that should be addressed. This component of the proposal aims to establish the notion that international tax arrangements can promote global wealth redistribution more effectively than other tools such as trade regulation. The second research strand would demonstrate that a fair tax regime, which considers issues of redistribution, would also allow for stable multinational tax coordination. Including a fair redistributive component into such a tax-coordination arrangement would provide it with political legitimacy and incentivise developing countries to join it. The proposed research would develop this point in the context of the most salient problem within the contemporary tax arena, the taxation of multinationals.
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2009-RG
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Funding Scheme
MC-IRG - International Re-integration Grants (IRG)Coordinator
91904 Jerusalem
Israel