Madariaga - College of Europe Foundation

Madariaga Paper, Vol. 3, No. 1, (Jan., 2010)

MARCO GIULI - Research Fellow, Madariaga - College of Europe Foundation

The aim of this paper is to assess whether decades of active promotion of tax competition by international and regional organisations played any role in the genesis of the global financial crisis. If income inequalities are among the structural causes of the crisis, tax policies that have contributed to increasing disparities over the last few decades cannot be neglected. This is especially the case in Europe, where competition to attract a larger tax base among governments is not extraneous to the persistence of specialisation within national borders and intra-EU trade imbalances leading to marcoeconomic destabilisation.