Tag Archives: Tax haven

Redrawing the Map of Global Capital Flows

Redrawing the Map of Global Capital Flows: The Role of Cross-Border Financing and Tax Havens, by Antonio Coppola, Matteo Maggiori, Jesse Schreger, and Brent Neiman:

We start with the dataset of global mutual fund and exchange traded fund (ETF) holdings provided by Morningstar and assembled in Matteo Maggiori, Brent Neiman and Jesse Schreger (2019a, henceforth MNS). For each position in the data, we link the security’s immediate issuer to its ultimate parent. The resulting data can then be used to create a mapping that transforms cross-border positions from a residency to nationality basis and that sheds light on how global firms finance themselves. …

First, in the case of bonds, positions are almost always reallocated away from Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and other tax havens. Under nationality, these positions are often associated with developing countries like Brazil, China, India, and Russia, which may reflect the fact that developing countries find it easier to issue offshore than onshore, where the legal system and institutional quality may be of concern to foreign investors. Reallocating positions from tax havens to developed countries is also common, though, perhaps because tax havens allow them to access international investors with less onerous rules governing the withholding of taxes on interest payments. These patterns may also reflect tax-driven profit-shifting, whereby one unit of a company raises money at a low interest rate in a low-tax regime and loans it at a higher interest rate to an affiliated unit in a high-tax regime.

Second, in the case of equities, we find that many developed-country investments in tax havens are actually associated under nationality with China. Many of these positions are in securities issued through Variable Interest Entities (VIE), a structure designed to avoid China’s capital controls and the legality of which may rest on tenuous ground. Relatedly, we see a large share of equities reallocated by our algorithm away from Ireland and to developed countries, an adjustment reflecting the popularity of “tax inversions” there.

Third, in the case of asset-backed securities, for several investor countries, we find large reallocations toward the domicile of the investor, often because the underlying assets are found there. For example, our reallocation matrix records that 73.4 percent of U.S. investment in Cayman Islands’ asset-backed securities should instead be thought of as U.S. domestic investment, largely because those securities are backed by U.S. mortgages.

US Top Income Shares Rose Less Dramatically

That’s what Gerald Auten and David Splinter argue in a paper from last year.

… new estimates of top income shares using two consistent measures of income. Our measure of consistent market income includes full corporate profits and adjusts for changes from TRA86, including changes to the tax base and increased filing by dependent filers. In addition, we include employer paid payroll taxes and health insurance and adjust for falling marriage rates. The effect of these adjustments on estimated top income shares are dramatic. Using a consistent measure of market income shows that the increase in income shares of the top one percent since 1979 is about half of the PS unadjusted estimate. The increase since 1960 is about one-quarter of the unadjusted estimate. Moreover, our measure of broad income that includes government transfers reduces the top one percent share increase to one-tenth of the unadjusted estimate.

But in an NBER working paper, Annette Alstadsaeter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman argue that tax evasion and offshore wealth holdings work in the opposite direction:

Because offshore wealth is very concentrated at the top, accounting for it increases the top 0.01% wealth share substantially in Europe, even in countries that do not use tax havens extensively. It has considerable effects in Russia, where the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore. These results highlight the importance of looking beyond tax and survey data to study wealth accumulation among the very rich in a globalized world.

Tax Evasion in a (the) New World

In the FT, Vanessa Houlder reports about the tax evasion business. The new regulatory environment has led to portfolio adjustments and new types of behavior, and it exposes vast differences in enforcement across countries:

  • Diamonds in vaults rather than financial assets.
  • Trusts in South Dakota rather than anonymous bank accounts.
  • Moving to a different country rather than just shifting assets.
  • FATCA versus the Common Reporting Standard.

The article also links to an article by Kara Scannell and Vanessa Houlder earlier in the year entitled “US tax havens: The new Switzerland.” That article includes the following quotes:

I think the US is already the world’s largest offshore centre. It has done a real good job disabling competition from Swiss banks.

In a world where it’s very hard to hide ownership or hide assets sometimes the easiest place [is one] no one would normally think of, which is the US.

EU Tax Blacklist

The Economist reports (somewhat belated) about a blacklist put together by the European Union. The EU list aggregates lists of member states which applied different criteria and in parts were outdated. The Economist writes:

As pressure has mounted, however, Brussels has backtracked. At a meeting with the 30 ostracised states last month, it agreed to make clearer reference to efforts that some of them have made to adhere to new tax-transparency standards—though it is not clear if it will ditch the “non-co-operative” label.

Corporate Taxation, Profit Shifting and Cross-Border Tax Avoidance and Evasion

Matthew Klein discusses corporate and personal income tax evasion and avoidance in the FT (part 1, part 2), with reference to a JEP article by Gabriel Zucman. Klein makes several points:

  • Profit taxes were introduced as complements to income taxes, in order to make it more difficult to evade taxes by routing profits through fabricated corporate structures rather than distributing them. To avoid double taxation, capital gains and dividends typically are taxed at lower rates than labor income.
  • Whether corporate taxation should be coordinated internationally is not a new question. The League of Nations already debated it. The issue regained importance as international trade and cross-border profit flows rose.
  • Today, a third of US corporate profits are generated outside of the US. Of those, more than half are generated in Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland and the Carribean. Both shares have increased over recent decades (see the figure below which is taken from Zucman’s article). This might have contributed towards lowering the effective corporate tax rate of US corporations in the US.
    Zucman-tax-haven-share-of-foreign-profits-590x437
  • If the objective is to (i) avoid double taxation and (ii) render cross-border profit shifting irrelevant, an easy way forward could be to credit a corporation’s taxes paid worldwide against the personal income taxes owed by the corporations shareholders. This would imply that higher corporate taxes abroad could lead to lower domestic income tax revenue, a difficult political sell. It would also imply that unrealised capital gains may go untaxed.
  • Based on discrepancies between national balance of payments statistics, Zucman estimates that 8% of global household financial wealth is not reported to tax authorities (see the table below which is taken from Zucman’s article).
    Zucman-offshore-wealth-propensity-590x432
  • He proposes to impose high tariffs on exports originating from “tax havens” to force these countries to exchange information about bank accounts and, in the medium term, to create an “international financial registry.”