Taxes, by the multinational avoidance of 200 billion dollars

• IMF: taxes on rich and high incomes to help recovery

• Usa: "Yes to a global minimum tax on multinationals"

Share

April 07, 2021 Ten 'tax havens' receive most of the

: three are European countries - Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland - and then there are the usual suspects, Cayman Islands, Singapore, Bermuda, Puerto Rico.

These are the data of a recent study by the

, International Center for Tax and Development, based in the United Kingdom, which highlighted how multinationals have moved a thousand billion dollars in profits from the place where economic activity takes place. towards 'tax havens', depriving states of over

in revenue.

The study is mainly based on data available only for 2016, provided by the same companies, made public by the OECD for the first time in 2020. The ICTD researchers also found that multinationals based in the United States and Bermuda are serve for the transfer of profits in a massive way and that it is the low-income countries that suffer the greatest losses from tax evasion or avoidance.  

Petr Janský, an economist at Charles University in Prague, co-author of the study with data scientist Javier Garcia-Bernardo, stressed that the main issue is not that "multinational companies benefit from this tax avoidance regime, but that someone is harmed. ", like African countries, the most" vulnerable "to the transfer of profits.

But corporate tax avoidance also affects high-income countries, such as the United States, while Germany or France are estimated to lose at least a quarter of their profit base due to profit shifting, the economist says.

In 2017, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists -

 - revealed that more than 100 multinational companies, including

and Botox maker

, are using tax havens.