Peter Dietsch: Catching Capital

Pour la présentation finale du Colloque Spiegel Sohmer sur la politique fiscale 2014, la Chaire Stikeman en droit fiscal a le plaisir d'accueillir le professeur Peter Dietsch, département de philosophie, Université de Montréal.

Les présentations et les discussions, bien qu’ayant lieu dans le cadre d’un cours, seront ouvertes tant au public qu'aux étudiants et universitaires. Tous sont les bienvenus.

Résumé

(En anglais seulement) When individuals stash away their wealth in offshore bank accounts and multinational corporations shift their profits or their actual production to low-tax jurisdictions, this undermines the fiscal autonomy of political communities and contributes to rising inequalities in income and wealth. These practices are fuelled by tax competition, with countries strategically designing fiscal policy to attract capital from abroad

Building on a careful analysis of the ethical challenges raised by a world of tax competition, the book puts forward a normative and institutional framework to regulate the practice. In short, individuals and corporations should pay tax in the jurisdictions of which they are members, where this membership can come in degrees. Moreover, the strategic tax setting of states should be limited in important ways. An International Tax Organisation (ITO) should be created to enforce the principles of tax justice.

The author defends this call for reform against two important objections. First, Dietsch refutes the suggestion that regulating tax competition will harm economic efficiency. Second, he argues that regulation of this sort, rather than representing a constraint on national sovereignty, in fact turns out to be a requirement of sovereignty in a global economy. The book closes with a series of reflections on the obligations that the beneficiaries of tax competition have towards the losers both prior to any institutional reform and in its aftermath.

Peter Dietsch est Professeur agrégé au département de philosophie de Université de Montréal. Ses intérêts principaux de recherche convergent sur des questions de distribution en éthique économique et sociale. Parmi ses plus récentes publications, signalons “Tax Competition and Global Background Justice” dans The Journal of Political Philosophy et il travaille sur un livre sur la concurrence fiscale intitulé Catching Capital.