Capital Taxation, Globalization, and International Tax Competition

The historical evolution of the corporate tax burden in the OECD nations is studied, beginning with an assessment of alternative measures of the burden. Descriptive analysis of these time series reveals no evidence of a competitive "race to the bottom" in capital taxation, and little evidence of even a harmonization of the tax burden. These conclusions for the OECD and Europe as a whole are confirmed by cointegration analysis, which does however indicate that there may have been some modest harmonization within smaller groups of countries.