We argue that the independent agency of EU institutions can serve not only to tie the member states to previous policy commitments, as argued in the extant literature, but also to untie member states from commitments that have become outdated and harmful. The European Central Bank saved the Euro...

It pays to be a tax haven. Ireland has become rich that way. Why do not all countries cut their capital taxes to get wealthy? One reason is structural. As the standard model of tax competition explains, small countries gain from competitive tax cuts while large countries suffer. Yet not all...

We map recent trends of tax policy change in developing countries and transition economies, compare them to tax trends in the advanced Western democracies and review some of the explanations offered for these trends by the contributions to this volume. We find that non-Western countries follow...

The paper analyzes the common assumption that the EU has little power over taxation. We find that the EU's own taxing power is indeed narrowly circumscribed: Its revenues have evolved from rather supranational beginnings in the 1950s towards an increasingly intergovernmental system. Based on a...

This article reviews the social science literature on tax competition in three steps. The first step is to look at the baseline model of tax competition on which most of the literature implicitly or explicitly builds. The key feature is that governments in a context of open borders will engage...

Tax competition in the European Union is shaped by four partly opposed institutional mechanisms. While market integration and enlargement increase competitive pressure, the tax co-ordination of the Council of Ministers and the tax jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice could potentially...

This article challenges the common assumption that the European Union (EU) has little power over taxation. Based on a comprehensive analysis of EU tax legislation and European Court of Justice (ECJ) tax jurisprudence from 1958 to 2007, the article shows that the EU exerts considerable regulatory...