The architecture of the country-by-country minimum tax regime proposed by the United States

The article discusses the structural dynamics that will underlie the international negotiations prompted by a U.S. proposal about a minimum global tax. Section 1 outlines the main features of this proposal, while section 2 describes more in detail how home countries can upgrade their strategies against profit shifting and tax competition through a “country-by-country minimum tax” under a comprehensive agreement pursued at OECD/G20 level. The article then discusses at sections 3 and 4 how we are heading toward an “international tax regime”, a concept drawn from international relations and now brought to bear in international taxation. To address this question a grammar of tax concepts is presented about multilateralism and cooperation together with a description of how rational-choice theory can be applied to collective action problems, to draw at section 5 some preliminary conclusions about the country-by-country minimum tax regime and its impact at OECD level. The article concludes at section 6 by canvassing a potential paradigm shift in international taxation toward cooperative minilateralism, as we move in the direction of a global minimum tax.