ABSTRACT
This article presents a history of international tax governance and offers a
rationalist reconstruction of its trajectory. As an unintended consequence of
its institutional setup, the tax regime, which originally only dealt with double
tax avoidance, produces harmful tax competition. Despite this negative
effect there are only incremental and partial changes of the regime, which
are insufficient to curb tax competition. I argue that this development can be
explained by considering the properties – and the sequence in which they
come up – of the collective action problems inherent in double tax avoidance
and tax competition. First, in double tax avoidance, a coordination game
with a distributive conflict, governments did not want to endanger the solution
they had institutionalized long before tax competition became virulent.
Second, governments are unable to resolve the emergent asymmetric prisoner’s
dilemma of tax competition due to conflicts of interest among big and
small country governments and successful lobbying of corporate capital.
As a result, the institutional trajectory is characterized by the simultaneous
occurrence of stability in the core principles and indirect and incremental
changes of the rules in the form of rule stretching and layering.