The financial crisis of 2007-2009 is now broadly recognised as a once-in-a-generation inflection point in the history of global economic governance. It has also prompted a reconsideration of established paradigms in international political economy (IPE) scholarship. Developments in global tax governance open a window onto these ongoing changes, and in this essay we discuss four recent volumes on the topic drawn from IPE and beyond, arguing against an emphasis on institutional stability and analyses that consider taxation in isolation. In contrast, we identify unprecedented changes in tax cooperation that reflect a significant contemporary reconfiguration of the politics of global economic governance writ large. To develop these arguments, we discuss the links between global tax governance and four fundamental changes underway in IPE: the return of the state through more activist policies; the global power shift towards large emerging markets; the politics of austerity and populism; and the digitalisation of the economy.

No abstract

Developing countries have concluded thousands of bilateral tax treaties, which restrict their 'taxing rights' over international investment. Qualitative case studies of these negotiation outcomes emphasize power politics, knowledge asymmetries and negotiating capability in the eventual distribution of taxing rights between signatories, yet such insights are absent from crosscountry quantitative work. This paper bridges the gap by replicating two quantitative studies, introducing new data on countries' ability to mobilize tax revenue and the outcomes of tax treaty negotiations. It provides statistical support for the insights from qualitative research. The size of a government's revenue base, and its reliance on corporate tax, might affect the salience of the revenue sacrifice in policy makers' minds. These variables influence the likelihood of signing a tax treaty and the particular concessions made. Power asymmetries between signatories lead to more unequal distributions of taxing rights away from developing countries, in contrast to the findings of earlier studies. Developing countries also become better negotiators as they gain experience.

No abstract

Global economic governance outcomes in areas such as corporate taxation may be influenced by transnational policy communities acting at national and transnational levels. Yet, while transnational tax policy processes are increasingly analyzed through the politics of expertise, national preferences have usually been derived from domestic interest group preferences. We know little about how technical expertise interacts with interest group politics at national level, an important deficit given the sovereignty-preserving, decentralized way in which transnational tax norms become hard law. This article examines the drivers of expansion of the UK's bilateral tax treaty network in the 1970s, which cannot be explained solely through monolithic interest group politics. Evidence from the British national archives demonstrates how tax experts in the civil service and the private sector, members of a transnational policy community, used tax treaties to impose OECD standards for taxing British firms on host countries, at times overruling the preferences of other political, bureaucratic and business actors. Expertise politics and business power may shape the development of norms and focal points within a transnational policy community, but it is often their interaction at domestic level that determines the implementation of transnational norms as hard law.