Maya Forstater

Is the corporate income tax in decline? I got thinking about this from @mforstater, critiquing an @IMFnews blog about tax avoidance and falling CIT rates. Maya’s quite right, of course, that rates can’t tell you about revenues. But are CIT revenues rising in general? (1/10)https://twitter.com/MForstater/status/1153654060085649409 …

I’m not sure CIT revenue as % of total revenues is necessarily the best metric. CIT revenues might rise modestly even with a shrinking base, if corporate profits are exploding? Likewise all tax revenues including CIT might be collapsing, but CIT collapsing more slowly? (2/10)

Ideally we’ld look at CIT revenues against corporate profits, as @danneidle has done for the UK. For 1 country this might still conceal profit shifting, but with consolidated profit figures, globally, we should see whether corporate ETRs are + or - https://twitter.com/DanNeidle/status/1134399939868577792 … (3/10)

Unfortunately international stats for corporate profits are not great outside Europe and the USA. I should construct my own dataset from e.g. Orbis, but I am far too lazy. (4/10)

The OECD does, though, produce stats covering 89 countries for CIT revenues as a % of GDP. Corporate profits don’t necessarily track GDP, but there should be some correlation between the growth of the economy and levels of corporate profits? (5/10)