Actors and authority in the international tax ecosystem

Abstract

This chapter provides an interdisciplinary framework for understanding changes in the international tax ecosystem. The chapter describes three broad disciplinary approaches to taxation grouped according to assumptions of how actors operate and project authority. On this basis, the international tax ecosystem framework consists of four components, with associated actors and forms of authority: jurisdictions, political mandates, markets, and normative environments. The framework emphasizes a sensitivity to different kinds of actorhood, and how changes are driven by actors’ claims to different forms of authority. After outlining the history of the international tax ecosystem, the framework is applied to present the most important changes to the tax ecology in the last decade. We argue that the evolution in the ecosystem is characterized by persistent legal indeterminacy and political complexity. The scholarly concern, then, is being open to different forms of actorhood and authority while untangling evolution within the international tax ecosystem.