研討日期

2006325上午10:00 ~ 下午1:00

研討地點

台大社會科學院第二會議室

討論文獻

題目

作者

文獻出處

Market size and tax competition

Ottaviano, Ypersele

Journal of International Economics 67 (2005)

報告人

彭正浩

參加人員

陳宏易、吳世傑、胡均立、陳盈秀、許淑瑛、陳玉晏、李玫郁、彭正浩、王胤杰、蔡明芳、衣珊

討論提要

With international externalities, different country sizes, imperfect competition, and trade costs, tax competition for mobile firms is efficiency-enhancing with respect to the free market outcome. Under both scenarios, the resulting inefficiencies in international specialization and trade flows vanish when trade costs are low enough. Otherwise, only international tax coordination can implement the efficient spatial distribution of firms.

結論

Economic integration usually dismantles barriers to goods and factors mobility while allowing governments to function independently in most policy areas. The existing literature identifies the basic requirements that a model must satisfy in order to tackle those questions: international externalities, different country sizes, imperfect competition, and trade costs. We have developed one such model featuring tax competition for mobile firms in a monopolistically competitive sector. In our model, when trade costs are large enough to make it inefficient for all firms to cluster in a single country, tax competition for mobile firms is efficiency-enhancing with respect to the free market outcome. This result is reversed as trade costs fall and clustering becomes efficient. Finally, under both scenarios, the resulting inefficiencies in international specialization and trade flows vanish when trade costs are low enough. In particular, our model suggests that, at the initial stages of an integration process, forbidding tax competition without agreeing on tax coordination is a bad idea. It is much less so at later stages, when the free market and the harmonization outcomes tend to coincide. This might explain why, for example, in the experiences of both the EU and NAFTA, the issue of tax competition has been gaining attention as integration proceeds.