Tax distortions in cross-border flows of intangible assets

Abstract

The phenomenon of global fragmented production and associated trade in intermediate products, including intangible assets, has changed how economists study globalization and how new public policies are shaped. Understanding cross-border flows of disembodied knowledge, often associated with intellectual property (IP), is essential for analyzing how modern economies operate. Available data to document these international IP-related knowledge flows—namely cross-border payments for IP—are distorted by various factors. Tax planning by multinational enterprises has seriously distorted the measurement of cross-border IP flows, affecting national measurements of imports, exports, GDP, and productivity. The tax-induced mismeasurement could be more than 35% of global charges for use of intellectual property, and greater for individual countries, particularly high-tax-rate countries. International initiatives to address the effects of tax base erosion, profit shifting, and other statistical initiatives on global value chains will improve future measurements of cross-border IP flows, improving the understanding of both the creation and uses of IP.