Tax competition and Leviathan

State Capacity, Capital Mobility, and Tax Competition

Abstract The theory of international tax competition suggests that governments attempt to attract mobile capital bases by undercutting the foreign capital tax rate. An analysis of the role that state capacity plays in tax policymaking under international pressures is, however, missing. The central contribution of our study is to highlight the importance of the interaction between state capaci...

The taming of Leviathan: Competition among governments

Agglomeration and Tax Competition

Tax competition for a mobile factor is different in ‘new economic geography settings’ compared to standard tax competition models. The agglomeration rent which accrues to the mobile factor in the core region can be taxed. Moreover, a tax differential between the core and the periphery can be maintained. The present paper reexamines this issue in a setting which, in addition to the core-peripher...

Leviathan and Competition among Jurisdictions: The Case of Benefit Taxation

The paper shows that interjurisdictional competition for mobile factors of production forces the government to raise the efficiency of the public sector and, thus, helps to tame Leviathan governments. However, this result is derived under some restrictive assumptions concerning the kind of tax policy used by the government. In the case of benefit taxes, e.g. user charges, a Leviathan may be tam...

International Tax Competition and Coordination

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the theory of international tax competition. Starting with the standard framework, it visits the non-cooperative equilibrium of tax competition, analyses aspects of partial and regional coordination, repeated interaction, stock-flow-effects, agglomeration effects and time consistency issues in dynamic models. We discuss profit shifting in the...