and Viard begin by arguing that, under certain assumptions, the corporate income tax is entirely counterproductive. Specifically, if corporations are able to easily shift their investments from high-tax countries to low-tax countries, then countries stand to gain nothing from levying higher corporate income taxes.
To illustrate this point with a specific example: imagine a corporation with significant investments in the United States. The U.S. government decides to impose a 35 percent corporate income tax on the corporation’s earnings. The corporation in question could react to the new corporate tax in two ways.
First, perhaps the corporation would simply pay the 35 percent tax, without making any changes to how it runs its business. Under this scenario, the corporation would see lower after-tax profits and would distribute fewer dividends to shareholders. In this case, the burden of the corporate income tax would fall entirely on the corporation’s shareholders.
However, in a globalized economy, the corporation might pursue a different course of action: it might respond to the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax by reducing its investments in the United States and increasing its investments in other countries. Specifically, we might expect a corporation to keep reducing its investments in the U.S. until it ends up with the same return-on-investment that it had before the tax was introduced.