Taxes and Illicit Trade
Taxation plays a key role in driving illicit trade. People respond to incentives, and sizable price markups for legal cigarettes create incentives for tax avoidance.
Taxation plays a key role in driving illicit trade. People respond to incentives, and sizable price markups for legal cigarettes create incentives for tax avoidance.
Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Christopher Coons (D-DE) have recently introduced a bill laying the groundwork for a possible solution to the problem: a tax on the carbon content of imports. But it falls short of the optimal approach in several ways.
With inflation continuing to skyrocket, especially for food, which reached 10.4 percent in June, it is worth examining how the ongoing U.S. trade war with China and U.S. tariff policy overall has impacted U.S. agriculture and food prices.
While the U.S. tariffs were intended to protect American industries, they have largely hurt the U.S. economy. Rather than pass on the tariffs to Chinese consumers, analysis shows that most U.S. firms simply bore the costs.
One unintended consequence of the tax proposals in the Build Back Better Act is a higher potential burden on wireless spectrum investments, which could slow the build out of 5G technology as the U.S. races to compete with other countries—moving in the opposite direction of countries like China that are actively subsidizing 5G expansion.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic crisis, countries in the Asia-Pacific region will see a differentiated impact on their capacity of mobilizing domestic revenue depending on the structure of their economy. According to the OECD report, those economies that rely mostly on natural resources, tourism, and trade taxes are especially vulnerable.
Countries around the world are implementing emergency tax measures to support their economies under the coronavirus (COVID-19) threat.
The Chinese approach to base erosion and profit shifting is more focused on the application of transfer pricing rules and not on the application of CFC rules. Even with the rules in place, the Chinese tax authorities have not enforced the rules as much as other countries have.