Yutao Han

On the desirability of tax coordination when countries compete in taxes and infrastructure

In our paper, we demonstrate that when countries compete in taxes and infrastructure, coordination through a uniform tax rate or a minimum rate does not necessarily create the welfare effects observed under pure tax competition. The divergence is even worse when the competing jurisdictions differ in institutional quality. If tax revenues are used to gauge the desirability of coordination, our model demonstrates that imposing a uniform tax rate is Pareto-inferior to the non-cooperative equilibrium when countries compete in taxes and infrastructure. This result is completely reversed under pure tax competition if the countries are sufficiently similar in size. If a minimum tax rate is set within the range of those resulting from the non-cooperative equilibrium, the low tax country will never be better off. Finally, the paper demonstrates that the potential social welfare gains from tax harmonization crucially depend on the degree of heterogeneity among the competing countries.

Does tax competition increase infrastructural disparity among jurisdictions

This paper investigates whether an economy that lags behind in infrastructure compared with other countries can make up its shortfall when it competes for foreign direct investments. The main message of the paper is that jurisdictional competition can enable the lagging country to reduce the infrastructural gap if capital mobility is sufficiently high and the gap is not too large. Further, we show that size asymmetry reinforces (weakens) the effect in reducing the infrastructural disparity resulting from interjurisdictional competition when the lagging economy is small (large).

Does Size Asymmetry Exacerbate the Inefficiency of Tax Competition

Many authors demonstrate that the tax gap resulting from tax competition increases with the size asymmetry of the competing countries. Consequently, increasing country-size disparities exacerbates the inefficiency of tax competition. The aim of this note is to show that this classical view has no general validity, if we consider that countries compete not only in taxes, but also in the provision of infrastructure. The simple model we develop for this purpose demonstrates that the effect of size disparity on efficiency depends crucially on the degree of international capital mobility.