NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Corporate Taxation and Bilateral FDI with Threshold Barriers

Assaf Razin, Yona Rubinstein, Efraim Sadka

NBER Working Paper No. 11196
Issued in March 2005
NBER Program(s):   IFM   ITI   PE

The paper brings out the special mechanism through which taxes influence bilateral FDI, when investment decisions are two-fold in the presence of fixed setup flows costs. For each pair of source-host countries, there is a set of factors determining whether aggregate FDI flows will occur at all, and a different set of factors determimnig the volume of FDI flows (provided that they occur). We demonstrate that the notion that the mere international tax differetials are a key factor behind the direction and magnitude of FDI flows is too simple. We argue that the source country tax rate works primarely on the selection process, whereas the host-country tax rate affect mainly the magnitude of the FDI, once they occur. We analyze international panel data with 24 OECD countries over the period 1981-1998 by the Heckman selection method to bring evidence in support of this argument.

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