International Tax Avoidance – Introduction

Tax avoidance and evasion is a hot topic. On the evasion (illegal activity by individuals) front, the various leaks culminating in the Panama Papers have once again revealed the scope of evasion by the global elite. Gabriel Zucman conservatively estimated the annual revenue loss at $200 billion. On the tax avoidance (legal activity by corporations) front, the OECD BEPS project has estimated the scope of avoidance by multinationals at between $100 and $240 billion per year. By comparison, total US corporate tax revenues are about $400 billion per year. The articles in this volume reflect various aspects of these troubling phenomena (from the perspective of citizens who pay their tax bills and bear the burden of budget cuts by governments starved of revenues). David Quentin discusses tax avoidance in transnational supply chains of multinationals. Blazej Kuzniacki analyzes tax avoidance in EU law, which has been the focus of a lot of activity recently (e. g., the proposed Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive by the EU Commission). Rifat Amir Azam Pichhadze and myself discuss the idea of statutory General Anti-Abuse Rule (GAAR) a global minimum effective tax rate as a global general anti-avoidance rule in the US and Canada contexts