International Percussions of Direct Taxes

This paper anlyzes the impact of tax competition between two countries of un- equal per-capita capital endownments on tax rates and efficiency when distorting wage, residence-based and source-based capital taxes (or any combination of two instruments) are available for governments. The national welfare costs and benefits of tax rate variations are shown to be ambiguous in the asymmetric Nash equilibrium due to the existence of tax base and terms of trade effects. Moreover, numerical simulation results indicate that non-cooperative equilibria in Nash strategies are inefficient from an international perspective, even if residence-based capital taxes are in the set of tax instruments available to fiscal authorities.