International Tax Competition: A Case for International Cooperation in Globalization

The liberalization of international financial flows and foreign direct investment has induced countries to use diverse measures to attract inflow of foreign capital and foreign direct investment, which is expected to have a positive effect on the growth of GDP and thus a positive effect on social welfare. Tax exemption, reduction of tax rate, tax holiday, or diverse subsidies are some of the most important measures used. In this paper we study international tax cooperation, i.e., countries change and especially reduce tax rate for corporate income or for asset revenues to attract inflow of foreign direct investment. Both theoretical and empirical studies have shown the sensibility of foreign direct investment decision with respect to tax rate differences between home countries and host countries. In general, more inflow of foreign direct investment can be expected if the tax rate of the home country is lower than that of foreign countries. This is the main reason for international tax cooperation. In this paper we propose a simple model to prove the sub-optimal Nash non cooperative solution in a two-country tax-competition game. The model shows that international tax cooperation can improve welfare of the participating countries. How to reach a cooperative solution for an international tax competition game (ITCG) is therefore an important issue for further discussions and studies. International institutions can play a crucial role to reach international tax cooperation or international tax harmonization.     

A “brer rabbit” case for reverse mandated benefits

Reverse mandated benefits is a government-mandated policy that requires employees to provide their employers with benefits that workers would not provide otherwise. Of course, only those benefits would be mandated that are worth more to employers than they cost, as determined by political authorities. My case for such a policy argues that it is at least as sensible as policies mandating that employers provide benefits to their employees that would not be provided otherwise.     

The government, the market, and the problem of catastrophic loss

This article addresses the comparative advantage of the government to the private property/casualty insurance industry for the provision of insurance coverage for catastrophic losses. That the government can play an important role as an insurer of societal losses has been a central public policy principle since at least the New Deal. In addition, our government typically automatically provides forms of specific relief following unusually severe or unexpected disasters, which itself can be viewed as a form of ex post insurance. This article argues that, for systemic reasons, the government is much less effective than the private property/casualty insurance market in providing coverage of losses generally, but especially of losses in contexts of catastrophes.     

The merton thesis: Oetinger and German Pietism,a significant negative case

The Merton thesis identifies two movements — English Puritanism and German Pietism — as causally significant in the development of the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. It attributes this connection to a strong compatibility between the values of ascetic Protestantism and those associated with modern science. This article questions Merton's conclusion regarding one of these movements, German Pietism, by arguing that the Pietist ethos stood in sharp conflict with what Merton has called the normative structure of science. One manifestation of this conflict involves Friedrich Oetinger's articulation of a contending religious-mystical conception of science, which assigned a central place to feeling, intuition, the role of the divine, and a qualitative approach to nature. This conception of science, it is argued, provides the clearest indication of the conceptual and valuative distance that tended to separate Pietists from the new science of the 17th and 18th centuries.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1990 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, in Virginia Beach.