The empirical evidence for corporate tax competition among the EU member states

Abstract

Abstract The paper is focused on the problem of corporate tax competition in EU as one of the current key issues for EU member states tax policies. The main objective is to empirically verify theoretical assumptions about corporate tax competition among EU member states. Based on the available empirical data we analyzed trends in effective and statutory tax rates and tested the theoretical assumption of possible spontaneous tax coordination. We found almost no support for spontaneous tax coordination for EU as a whole, but it appears to be more evident among neighbouring member states as well as in within the same regions. The differences in corporate tax rates between neighbour countries are mostly smaller and tend to shrink over the time. We have used panel data cointegration analysis to test for, and DOLS and FMOLS panel estimators to estimate, the long-run parameters. Finally panel vector error correction models (VECM) were used to examine short-run as well as long-run dependencies among the corporate tax policies of neighbouring EU countries. Based on our results we find evidence for relatively strong relationships between neighbouring EU member states in corporate tax rate setting.