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The Imperative for Strengthening International Tax Co-operationGUESTAngle John Langmore and Perrin Wilkins When delivering the eighth WIDER Annual Lecture on rethinking growth strategies in 2004 Dani Rodrik...
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Blog
Too late, too little? The IMF and international tax flight
When key decision makers of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gather in Washington DC for the IMF’s annual meeting in October, one thing that...
Working Paper
Policy diffusion within international organizationsI analyse the evolution of the International Monetary Fund tax policy advice in three countries commonly used for tax evasion or avoidance: Panama, Seychelles, and the Netherlands. A review of loan agreements and Country Reports covering 1999 to 2017...
Working Paper
The International Fiscal Implications of Global Poverty Reduction and Global Public Goods ProvisionThe mixed record on the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets and the focus on global public goods in post-MDG debates questions the future of traditional development co-operation (official development assistance, ODA). Meanwhile...
Blog
Capital flight from developing countries – what is it, how is it measured, and what have we learned?Many worry that developing countries lose a substantial amount of money via capital flight, that is, outflows of cash and securities — part of which...
Blog
Overcoming the challenge of illicit financial flows: Four pieces of advice for policymakers
From profit shifting to sanction evasion, illicit financial flows divert funds away from essential poverty-fighting and infrastructure programs. A...
Working Paper
What traders know: the (mis)perceptions of formal and informal cross-border tradersCross-border traders face a choice between official and unofficial border crossings. The latter allow them to evade taxes, but expose them to other risks, such as bribes, fines, and arrest. We investigate the perceptions of cross-border traders about...
Working Paper
Offshore tax evasion in developing countriesOffshore tax havens cause large losses of government revenue by facilitating tax evasion by wealthy individuals. This paper focuses on offshore tax evasion in developing countries and documents two empirical regularities. First, there is no clear...
Journal Article
Natural resource revenues and double taxation treaties in developing countries: insights from a network centrality approachThis paper investigates the impact of double taxation treaties (DTTs) on resource revenue mobilization in 91 resource-rich countries from 2000 to 2019. We calculate annual degree centrality indices to measure countries’ integration into the tax...
Working Paper
Herding, rent-seeking taxpayers, and endemic corruptionIn an environment with extensive corruption where much of the population evades paying their full taxes due, we tackle the question of optimal taxation when constituencies with opposing objectives (the poor and the rich) push tax policy in different...
Working Paper
The end of Londongrad? The impact of beneficial ownership transparency on offshore investment in UK propertyThe United Kingdom’s (UK) property markets are thought to be a common destination for corrupt and criminal assets and money laundering, with investment often through offshore shell companies. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we...
Working Paper
Revealing 21 per cent of GDP in hidden assetsThis paper studies the effectiveness of tax amnesties and their impacts on capital taxation and public spending. We leverage rich policy variation from Argentina, where left- and right-wing governments implemented multiple programmes and achieved...
Working Paper
So close and yet so far: the ability of mandatory disclosure rules to crack down on offshore tax evasionWe study the short-term effect of the introduction of the mandatory disclosure programme for aggressive tax arrangements by focusing on the one introduced in May 2018 under Council Directive 2018/288/EU (or DAC6). Employing bilateral data on cross...
Blog
How global tax dodging costs lives: New research shows a direct link to increased death ratesTax abuse is an expensive business. According to a recent report by the Tax Justice Network, avoiding or evading tax deprives governments across the...
Working Paper
The tax-price elasticity of offshore tax avoidanceThis study leverages a unique data set on the universe of transactions exiting the Ecuadorian economy to estimate the tax-price elasticity of demand for tax-sheltering activities using offshore fiscal havens. I determine this elasticity quasi...
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