How countervailing measures could be used to limit strategic tax competition. An international overview

This paper attempts to develop a thought experiment rather then to canvass a detailed blueprint for immediate reform because its goal is to elicit debate in a relatively new field of tax policy: Pigovian , or "corrective", or “regulatory” taxes (hereinafter “regulatory taxes”) at international tax level. Regulatory taxes have been proposed or enacted on a wide range of products and activities – such as carbon, gasoline, fat, sugar, guns, cigarettes, alcohol, traffic, zoning, executive pay, financial transactions and so on – by attributing portion or full social costs on those products and activities to the actors that make those products or carry out those activities. These taxes are in most cases imposed by governments on citizens and firms and are designed to change their behavior rather than raise revenue. This paper however discusses regulatory taxes which would be imposed at internation al level by coalitions of governments on other governments against certain forms of tax competition that are deemed to be harmful at a systemic level. So the paper develops an argument in favour of a more equitable attribution of tax responsibilities to governments to be implemented at multilateral level.