Based on an analysis of 3,844 tax treaties, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and its Commentaries (VCLT), and case law of various domestic and international courts.The current orthodoxy maintains that courts are not required to compare all language texts of a plurilingual treaty but...

Does the design of a tax matter for growth? Assembling a novel dataset for 30 OECD countriesover the 1970-2016 period, this paper examines whether the value added tax (VAT) may havedifferent effects on long-run growth depending on whether it is raised through the standard rateor through...

Taxation involves the compulsory transfer of resources among members of society. Tax policy is concerned with how societies carry out taxation. That is a technical and legal question, but it is inescapably a political, social, and cultural one as well. To study tax policy is to engage...

In this report, Fleming, Peroni, and Shay analyze the effects of including a final, low-rate minimum tax on U.S. multinational corporations in a territorial system. They continue to prefer a real worldwide international tax system, but see a final, low-rate minimum tax as a second-best measure...

Taxes designed to counter unsustainable behaviours that lead to environmental destruction are usually styled as surtaxes on purchase prices. It makes more sense to locate the source of the profits derived from such behaviours and tax them in order to internalize the environmental costs that are...

Abuse is one of the core issues in EU direct tax matters. Much has been written over the past years. The discussion on the interpretation and application of the different elements of the anti-abuse clauses appears to be settling. However, an equally fascinating discussion appears to be emerging:...

Despite the inherent complexity that the enforcement of transfer pricing rules entails, it is feasible—and desirable—to introduce simplification measures without abandoning this worldwide accepted standard, especially in the context of developing countries and despite reticence shown by...

Different in more ways than it is possible to easily enumerate, the formation of the United States and the European Union (EU) had a striking similarity of purpose: to increase citizens' welfare by uniting a collection of independent states, each with its own politics, culture, and economy. Of...

Researchers in a number of fields have explored the question of why people voluntarily comply with the tax laws. The resulting scholarship suggests that a number of factors influence that decision, but the precise role of, and interaction between, those factors continue to be subjects of debate....