What Determines Tax Incentives and How Effective Are They?

Abstract

This paper considers factors determining tax incentives and examines how effective they are using data from OCED and EU countries. It is well known that countries compete when it comes to setting the statutory corporate tax rate but do they also compete when it comes to providing tax incentives on the tax base side? The paper starts out by analyzing factors affecting different tax incentive measures and then moves on to analyze how effective different incentives are in attracting investments. We study several different tax incentives and find them to be ineffective in generating investments and, that, reductions of statutory corporate tax rates are a more efficient way to generate investments.