Elasticité des bases fiscales (composées des profits des sociétés)en Europe.

In this paper, we pursue several goals; we first check if the downward trend in corporate income tax rates in Europe reflects a strategy of tax competition, and not a "yardstick competition" in neighboring countries. We estimate the scale of fiscal externalities on neighboring countries in terms of taxable domestic resources outflows. Then, we discriminate the European countries according to their size in order to verify the theory of Bucovetsky (1991) and Wilson (1991) which predict a higher elasticity of tax bases in small countries. We use a panel of 25 European countries over the period 1995-2007 using tools from spatial econometrics. We show that the common trend to lower the corporate income tax rate can be partially explained by the existence of fiscal spillovers throw international flows of resources. Tax rates setting behaviors are interdependent and are evidences of tax competition in Europe.