Impact of Effective Tax Rates and Its Components on Foreign Direct Investment – The Case of the EU Member Countries

The empirical literature generally accepts the influence of corporate taxes on the investment decision of the multinationalities. The most papers usually consider more aspect of that tax then only statutory corporate tax rate. Using annual time series data for the period 1998-2011 this paper examines the influence of EMTR and EATR including their components on the foreign direct investments in the EU Member states. The main aim of the paper is to evaluate which of the selected types of effective tax rates explains the investment decisions of the multinationalities the best. The results show that the commonly used indicators of effective tax burden are not the best option for foreign direct investment (FDI) explanation in the investigated model. Perhaps the best indicator for evaluating dependencies between explanatory variables and FDI are the average and marginal effective tax rate from industrial buildings.