6 Jul 2019
Is Tax Competition Unavoidable?
Session 32
Should be welcome tax competition between countries or whine about it? The decision of the United States to lower the federal company tax rate from 34% to 21% is a major decision that reveals how the world’s largest economic power could not remain insensitive to the intense fiscal competition that European countries have engaged in for several decades. Is it the end point of this decline with a level of around 20-25%, beyond which the major countries will consider that they will all lose in deciding together to stop the race towards the lower tender fiscal policy?
In any case, it is symptomatic that the negotiating body for framed practices in the exchange of information and good practices has over the years become the OECD rather than the EU. Can the EU come back as a proposal force in the field, or are interests too divergent?
The lower company tax rate in the United States is helping to boost U.S. growth and thus support global economic activity, while helping to increase the attractiveness of investment in the United States. Is this general decline in the company tax rate ultimately an implicit response to the centuries-old stagnation and decline in the rate of return on capital reflected in some way by the decline in interest rates?