Publications & Documents

Tax incentives such as intellectual property regimes provide for reduced taxation of the income derived from research, development, and innovation related activities. By doing so, they lower the overall tax burden from investing in certain qualified intangible assets. This paper proposes a methodology to build indicators comparing the effect of income-based tax incentives for R&D and innovation on firms’ incentives to make R&D intangible investments. It provides insights into how such incentives affect firms’ decisions on whether, where and how much to invest in R&D intangibles. These indicators are used to illustrate the extent to which these tax incentives may create potential distortions to firms’ investment, protection and commercialisation decisions. The model is further developed to account for the design changes to such tax incentives introduced by the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting minimum standard.

The use of tax incentives that provide preferential tax treatment to the incomes arising from research and development (R&D) and innovation activities, such as intellectual property regimes, has accelerated over the last two decades. The globalisation of R&D together with the greater mobility of intangible income may have contributed to the rise in such incentives to attract and retain R&D and innovation activity while preventing the transfer of taxable base to other countries. This paper documents the changes to the availability and design of income-based tax incentives from 2000 onwards for 48 countries, including all OECD countries and EU countries. Building on this, the paper analyses trends in the generosity of income-based tax support over time by building indicators of effective tax rates that can provide insights into the impact of Action 5 of the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project.

This paper investigates two closely related questions concerning the responses of Multi-National Enterprise (MNE) investment to corporate income taxation using a panel of unconsolidated subsidiary-level and consolidated group-level data from the ORBIS database. First, the paper provides new evidence on the heterogeneity of investment responses to taxation across multinational firms. This paper finds that profit shifting opportunities, access to credit, and market power at the group level are associated with decreased investment sensitivity to taxation among MNE subsidiaries. Second, a new empirical approach is used to investigate how tax changes at the host jurisdiction level affect investment at the MNE group level and whether there are propagation effects to foreign subsidiaries within the same MNE group. This paper finds that taxation in one jurisdiction in which an MNE is active is positively associated with investment in its subsidiaries in other jurisdictions. This finding suggests that the well-document negative relationship between taxation and MNE investment within a host jurisdiction masks the MNE rebalancing the location of its investment to other host jurisdictions in response to changes in cross-jurisdictional tax rate differentials rather than purely decreasing its investment globally.

This annual publication compiles comparable tax revenue statistics for 30 economies, including Armenia, Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, People’s Republic of China, Cook Islands, Fiji, Indonesia, Japan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Nauru, New Zealand, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Thailand, Tokelau, Vanuatu and Viet Nam. Additionally, it provides information on non-tax revenues for selected economies. The publication applies the OECD Revenue Statistics methodology to Asian and Pacific economies, facilitating consistent comparison of tax levels and structures within the region as well as globally. This tenth edition of the report includes a special feature on strengthening property taxation in Asia. The publication is jointly produced by the OECD’s Centre for Tax Policy and Administration and the OECD Development Centre, in co-operation with the Asian Development Bank, the Pacific Islands Tax Administrators Association and the Pacific Community.

Business investment in OECD countries has remained weak, in particular since the 2008 global financial crisis. At the same time, the cost of capital has significantly and steadily decreased over the last thirty years, reflecting a fall in both interest rates and corporate tax rates. This raises the question of whether business investment still responds to the cost of capital and thus whether corporate tax policy can support investment. This paper analyses trends in business investment and in the cost of capital in OECD countries over the past three decades. Then, it investigates empirically the sensitivity of business investment to corporate taxation, and how this sensitivity varies across firm, investment and tax-design characteristics. Panel regressions at the firm and industry levels confirm that business investment rates are negatively related to corporate taxation, measured by country-level forward-looking effective tax rates. However, the tax sensitivity of business investment has fallen significantly since the global financial crisis. It also differs significantly across firms, assets, and corporate tax design characteristics. Overall, the estimation results suggest that a nuanced and granular approach to corporate tax policy, accounting for heterogeneity in tax sensitivity, is needed to support investment effectively. The paper discusses possible policy options, including the reduction of non-profit taxes, the use of targeted corporate income tax instruments, and the use of more generous capital allowances where they may induce strong investment responses.