Tax games: the case of Ireland in the global dynamics of corporate taxation

This article proposes a new analytical framework of ‘tax games’ providing fresh insights into the dynamics of global corporate taxation. Tax games are defined as institutionalised configurations of strategic interaction among states and corporations in rule-based orders. These games are constituted by the organisation and interaction of four fundamental dimensions of tax: The rate of taxation, the jurisdiction which makes the claim, the capital owner responsible for any payment, and the definition of the return upon which the tax is claimed. The configurations of tax games re-arrange over time in response to contestation over political legitimacy. Through interviews and documentary analysis of sectoral and statistical data we examine the critical case of the Republic of Ireland. The article provides a new account of change in corporate taxation by tracing the entanglement of three kinds of power—instrumental, structural and (a version of) infrastructural power—across six Irish games over seventy years. We closely examine the case of Apple, significant both to Ireland and to the global tax games, revealing tax politics among state agencies, within the interactions of state tax codes, and the power relations within and beyond the United States-Ireland onshore-offshore world.