When the finance ministers of the world’s seven largest rich economies met in Chantilly, France last week, they had a tense discussion about reforming multinational corporate taxation. US officials were peeved at the French hosts for enacting a national sales tax on the local business of global tech groups such as Google and Facebook. Whether Americans are right to see the unilateral tax move as a raid on their companies, it has clearly added impetus to G7 efforts to reform international tax rules.
The obvious lesson here is that one country going it alone can force otherwise elusive co-operation. The less obvious, but even more important lesson, is that nation-states retain much more unilateral power than we have been trained to believe.
For the longest time, multinational corporations have been allowed to get away with intelligence-insulting tax wheezes, which were no less obnoxious for being perfectly legal. (Remember the funny bit of Irish tax law that allowed tech companies to incorporate subsidiaries in Ireland that were residents of nowhere for tax purposes?) We were also told that fixing the taxation of capital in an era of globalisation could only work if everyone agreed on it — and the political establishment across the western world suggested that such agreement would be very hard to achieve.