Global distribution of revenue loss from corporate tax avoidance: re-estimation and country results

Abstract

International corporate tax is an important source of government revenue, especially in lower-income countries. An innovative study of the scale of this problem was carried out by International Monetary Fund researchers and published in 2016. We first re-estimate their model and then explore the effects of introducing higher-quality revenue data from the International Centre for Tax and Development–World Institute for Development Economics Research Government Revenue Database. Whereas IMF researchers report results for two country groups only, we present country-level results to make the most detailed estimates available. Our findings support a somewhat lower estimate of global revenue losses of around US$500 billion annually and indicate that the greatest intensity of losses occurs in low-income and lower middle-income countries and across sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and South Asia. © 2018 UNU-WIDER. Journal of International Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.