Co-Ordination of Corporate Exit Taxation in the Internal Market and Beyond
Corporate exit taxation is an important obstacle to the deepening of economic integration within the internal market and beyond, as it distorts cross-border business activities of multinational enterprises and hinders cross-border business reorganisations. This article argues that the problems related to corporate exit taxation can only be addressed in a satisfactory way through co-ordination. It describes how a co-ordinated corporate exit taxation regime should be designed and how it could be implemented within the EU, in the context of a common corporate tax base or through a targeted harmonisation measure, as well as outside the EU in Double Taxation Conventions.
Risk and Redistribution in Open and Closed Economies
A growing body of tax scholarship considers the interplay of taxation and risk in the domestic context. This article is the first attempt in the tax literature to analyze systematically the relationship between tax and risk in the international, or open economy, setting. I demonstrate how common tax instruments can result in certain jurisdictions disproportionately taxing a portion of the upside gains from successful risky investments, while other jurisdictions end up disproportionately bearing the costs associated with unsuccessful ones. This leads to a phenomenon that I call “divergence.” I provide formal specifications for divergence and then make a preliminary assessment of its magnitude. The distributive effects of divergence appear to be substantial, arguably on the same order of magnitude, from the U.S. perspective, as the nonmilitary foreign aid budget. I then turn to a normative critique of these distributive effects, based on conflicts with the jurisdictional entitlement to tax on the basis of source and with domestic policies regarding the subsidization of risky investment. Finally, I discuss possible responses, including a shift towards global formulary apportionment in transfer pricing and greater reliance on territorial over worldwide systems of taxation.
The OECD Discussion Draft on the Transfer of Intangibles (Revision of Chapter VI of the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines)  Main Comments
  On 6 June 2012, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a discussion draft on the Proposed Revision of Chapter VI of the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines (TPG) and Related Provisions. Intertax publishes the full text of the discussion draft together with the comments submitted by members of Baker & McKenzie Global Transfer Pricing Practice and Global Tax Policy Group. While applauding the document for clarifying a number of important issues related to the application of the arm's length principle to situations involving intangibles, the commentators also believe that the Discussion Draft on several occasions presents departures from the arm's length principle and from the existing guidance in the 2010 TPG. They suggest that the concerns expressed by some countries in relation to specific structures should be addressed within the appropriate legal and policy parameters and that the TPG should remain an interpretative tool of the arm's length principle as set forth in Article 9 of the OECD Model Tax Convention. In addition, they suggest that the guidance in the revised Chapter VI should be balanced and acknowledge that the facts and circumstances of each case ought to be taken into account in a transfer pricing analysis. Prescriptive requirements should not be set as substitutes for comparability analysis.