Empirical Research: Influence of domestic constituencies in the implementation of international tax standards and legitimacy of global tax governance

Abstract

The intensification of global governance activities in the area of international taxation has raised the question of the democratic legitimacy of the process since decisions in multilateral institutions are typically made by members of the executive alone and predominantly those from developed countries. There are opportunities to influence discussions at the global level for non-state actors, but the capacity to do so is unequally distributed. Yet, the results of global standard-setting processes need to be implemented domestically which affords opportunities for a wider range of constituencies to influence the outcome, among them elected parliamentarians, businesses, and local civil society. On the one hand, this two-stage process mitigates the lack of inclusiveness in global governance; on the other hand, it may jeopardize the effectiveness of global standards in achieving harmonization. In practice, opportunities for stakeholders to influence the implementation process and the interest to actually do so vary across countries. The purpose of this article is to chart this variation and discuss what it means for the global governance process. This is sourced from interviews on the implementation of the BEPS project’s standards with different tax policy stakeholders in Australia, Colombia, India, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Senegal and Spain. With this data it is identified which non-governmental constituencies exist in each country, what are their interest vis-à-vis different elements of the BEPS Project, and what means they have at their disposal to influence the implementation process. The findings indicate variation across countries regarding the direction in which governmental and non-governmental stakeholders try to influence the outcomes as well as regarding their opportunities to effectively influence implementation processes. This entails that the level of implication of stakeholders will be context-dependent and so will be the answer to the question on whether the participation in the implementation process can ‘compensate’ for a lack of participation in standard setting processes. Global tax governance, democratic legitimacy, international taxation, domestic implementation, stakeholder inclusiveness, expert interviews