PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This contribution discusses the possibility of tax cooperation from a European perspective. Research on tax cooperation focuses on the resistance of powerful states or the failed efforts of the OECD and emphasizes the unlikelihood of cooperation in tax matters. Important developments from the EU tend to be overlooked. This paper closes this gap by providing a detailed account of EU corporate tax policy and reconstructing the evolution of this policy field over a period of 15 years. The study is based on a chronological review of EU corporate tax provisions since 2003 and a quantitative content analysis of 936 documents from the Commission and the Council. It shows that EU corporate tax policy has undergone a significant change, which is characterized by an intensification of the regulatory efforts against corporate tax avoidance and the identification of new problems and solutions along the ideas of fairness and transparency. Contrary to conventional scholarship, those findings suggest that tax cooperation is becoming feasible within the EU, at least in the field of corporate taxation.