This paper looks at a county’s central government optimal policy in a setting where its two identical local regions compete for the attraction of footloose multinationals to their sites, and where the considered multinationals strictly prefer this country to the rest of the world. For the sake of reality the model allows the local regions to choose between the implementation of firm-specific and non-firm-specific policies. We find that, even though the two local regions are identical, some degree of regional tax competition is good for country’s welfare. Moreover, we show that the implementation of the regional firmspecific policies weakly welfare dominates the implementation of the regional non-firmspecific ones. Hence the not infrequent calls for the central government to ban the former type of policies go against the advice of this paper.
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Paper provided by Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB) in its series Working Papers with number
2009/34.
Find related papers by JEL classification: F23 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - Multinational Firms; International Business H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies H71 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Bond, Eric W & Samuelson, Larry, 1986.
"Tax Holidays as Signals,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 76(4), pages 820-26, September.
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