TY - CEPII
A1 - Manon Francois A1 - Vincent Vicard
TI - Seules les multinationales suffisamment complexes font de l’évitement fiscal
IS - 434
T3 - La lettre du CEPII
KW - Complexity KW - Firm Organisation KW - Multinational Enterprises KW - Profit Shifting KW - Tax Avoidance
N2 -
Tax avoidance by multinationals made headlines in 2021 with the international agreement on reforming the taxation of multinational enterprises. While the importance of the issue is no longer debated, little is known about which firms are most likely to engage in tax avoidance. It turns out that the complexity of the ownership structure of the subsidiaries of a multinational firm – be it a flat structure in which headquarters directly owns its subsidiaries or a more complex organization involving chains of ownership – plays an important role in these schemes: only sufficiently complex multinationals shift profits from their high-tax subsidiaries to those located in low-tax countries.