A organização para cooperação e desenvolvimento econômico - OCDE e a concorrência tributária internacional em perspectiva

Abstract

A set of events that altered the structure of the tax systems took place since the 50s. Easing of restrictions to the capital flow, deregulation of markets, globalization and major technological development stand out. These factors contributed to make capital an asset highly movable, transferable to any location on the planet. Realizing this new reality, some countries and jurisdictions established legal regimes aiming to attract geographically movable investments. Such measures consisted basically on provision of tax benefits and protection through secrecy of investments and their investors. In response, the countries that previously hosted these investments adopted measures to contain the output of assets or to attract other investments. Such competitive situation reverberated on the scope of taxation since the most common instrument used to attract investments were tax benefits. The international tax competition began to worry some countries, more precisely the most economically developed ones. This resulted in the initiative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to fight against harmful tax competition. The target set by the OECD was to eliminate harmful tax practices both in member countries and non-member countries. In order to achieve this, the OECD suggested the identification of tax havens and harmful preferential tax regimes, and determined shift towards level playing field. However, over the years, the OECD understanding on methods to eliminate the harmful competition has changed, focusing basically on the issue of transparency and effective exchange of information for tax purposes. This work aims to demonstrate the transition between the initial proposal of the OECD, presented on the Report "Harmful tax competition: an emerging global issue", and the organization performance on this subject today.