Working Paper
Global profit shifting, 1975–2019

This paper constructs time series of global profit shifting covering the 2015–19 period, during which major international efforts were implemented to curb profit shifting.

We find that (i) multinational profits grew faster than global profits, (ii) the share of multinational profits booked in tax havens remained constant at around 37 per cent, and (iii) the fraction of global corporate tax revenue lost due to profit shifting rose from 9 to 10 per cent.

We extend our time series back to 1975 and document a remarkable increase of multinational profits and global profit shifting from 1975 to 2019.

Supplementary material

Data Appendix (WZ2022)