Regardless of an identical statutory tax charge for multinational firms (MNCs) throughout many international locations, the efficient tax charge that MNCs really pay differs enormously — as little as 1% of gross earnings in Luxembourg and as excessive as 67% in Norway.
That’s one conclusion of a examine revealed this week within the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Javier Garcia-Bernardo of Utrecht College, the Netherlands, Petr Janský of Charles College, Czechia, and Thomas Tørsløv of Danmarks Nationalbank, Denmark. The examine comes on the heels of current European Union laws that goals to set a minimal efficient tax charge throughout international locations and redistribute MNC earnings to deal with tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance by MNCs contributes to inequalities each between and inside international locations, and understanding the efficient tax charges paid by MNCs in numerous international locations is crucial to minimizing these inequalities. Within the new examine, researchers developed a brand new framework for computing the country-level efficient tax charges for MNCs, utilizing MNC earnings assertion information that features earnings throughout international locations and taxes paid in numerous jurisdictions. They utilized the framework to MNCs in 47 international locations, largely belonging to the European Union.
The examine discovered that the quantity of taxes accrued by MNCs varies significantly from nation to nation and divulges the extent of the variations between efficient tax charges and statutory tax charges for a lot of international locations. On the excessive ends of the efficient tax charge vary had been Luxembourg, with MNCs paying a charge of 1-8% of gross earnings in taxes, and Norway, with MNCs paying as a lot as 46-67%, regardless of the 2 international locations having almost equivalent statutory tax charges of 28% and 29%.
The authors conclude that statutory charges don’t present quite a lot of info on the tax burden that MNCs really face in lots of international locations, and that higher information is required to acquire extra dependable efficient tax charge estimates and obtain extra knowledgeable coverage selections.
The authors add: “We discover that efficient tax charges considerably differ throughout international locations and from statutory charges for some international locations. These findings must be of specific curiosity within the gentle of current modifications within the taxation of multinationals worldwide such because the 2021 settlement of greater than 100 international locations worldwide to a world minimal tax charge of 15%.”