TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lipsey,Robert E.
TI  - Measuring the Location of Production in a World of Intangible Productive Assets, FDI, and Intrafirm Trade
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14121
PY  - 2008
Y2  - June 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14121
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14121.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Robert E. Lipsey
NBER
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5318
New York, NY 10016-4309
Tel: 212/817-7961
Fax: 212/817-1597
E-Mail: N/A user is deceased
AB  - As production comes to depend more on intangible productive assets, the location of production by multinational firms becomes increasingly ambiguous.  The reason is that, within the firm, these assets have no clear geographical location, but only a nominal location determined by the firm's tax or legal strategies. <br><br>The effects of these location ambiguities, and the resulting distortions for tax reasons of the location of production, are described and it is estimated that for U.S. firms' affiliates in a few tax havens alone, the exaggeration of value added in those locations amounted, in 2005, to about 4 percent of worldwide affiliate sales, and the exaggeration of sales to about 10 percent of worldwide affiliate sales. 

Some possibilities for estimating the location of production that could supersede the present dependence on accounting measures distorted by tax-saving policies are described.
ER  -