As production comes to depend more on intangible productive assets, the location of production by multinational firms becomes increasingly ambiguous. The reason is that, within the firm, these assets have no clear geographical location, but only a nominal location determined by the firm's tax or legal strategies.
The effects of these location ambiguities, and the resulting distortions for tax reasons of the location of production, are described and it is estimated that for U.S. firms' affiliates in a few tax havens alone, the exaggeration of value added in those locations amounted, in 2005, to about 4 percent of worldwide affiliate sales, and the exaggeration of sales to about 10 percent of worldwide affiliate sales. Some possibilities for estimating the location of production that could supersede the present dependence on accounting measures distorted by tax-saving policies are described.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
14121.
Length: Date of creation: Jun 2008 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14121
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D2 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations F23 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - Multinational Firms; International Business H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies
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