In The Hypocritical Hegemon, Lukas Hakelberg takes a close look at how US domestic politics affects and determines the course of global tax policy. Through an examination of recent international efforts to crack down on offshore tax havens and the role the United States has played, Hakelberg uncovers how a seemingly innocuous technical addition to US law has had enormous impact around the world, particularly for individuals and corporations aiming to avoid and evade taxation. Through bullying and using its overwhelming political power, writes Hakelberg, the United States has imposed rules on the rest of the world while exempting domestic banks for the same reporting requirements. It can do so because no other government wields control over such huge financial and consumer markets. This power imbalance is at the heart of The Hypocritical Hegemon. Thanks to generous funding from COFFERS EU, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
In The Hypocritical Hegemon, Lukas Hakelberg takes a close look at how US domestic politics affects and determines the course of global tax policy. Through an examination of recent international efforts to crack down on offshore tax havens and the role the United States has played, Hakelberg uncovers how a seemingly innocuous technical addition to US law has had enormous impact around the world, particularly for individuals and corporations aiming to avoid and evade taxation. Through bullying and using its overwhelming political power, writes Hakelberg, the United States has imposed rules on the rest of the world while exempting domestic banks for the same reporting requirements. It can do so because no other government wields control over such huge financial and consumer markets. This power imbalance is at the heart of The Hypocritical Hegemon. Thanks to generous funding from COFFERS EU, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
In The Hypocritical Hegemon, Lukas Hakelberg takes a close look at how US domestic politics affects and determines the course of global tax policy. Through an examination of recent international efforts to crack down on offshore tax havens and the role the United States has played, Hakelberg uncovers how a seemingly innocuous technical addition to US law has had enormous impact around the world, particularly for individuals and corporations aiming to avoid and evade taxation. Through bullying and using its overwhelming political power, writes Hakelberg, the United States has imposed rules on the rest of the world while exempting domestic banks for the same reporting requirements. It can do so because no other government wields control over such huge financial and consumer markets. This power imbalance is at the heart of The Hypocritical Hegemon. Thanks to generous funding from COFFERS EU, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.
Defence date: 14 November 2016 ; Examining Board: Professor Adrienne Héritier, EUI/Supervisor; Professor Philipp Genschel, EUI/Co-Supervisor; Professor Eric Helleiner, University of Waterloo; Professor Thomas Rixen, University of Bamberg ; International cooperation against tax evasion has had a long history of failure. Tax havens protecting the income and identities of their foreign clients through financial secrecy have persistently resisted requests from major developed economies for administrative assistance. Since 2014, however, more than 100 countries, including all major offshore centers, have agreed to automatically exchange information (AEI) on capital income earned by non-residents. Why did tax havens adopt AEI after decades of firm resistance against greater financial transparency? Conventional theories of tax cooperation do not provide an answer. Contractualist approaches expect international agreements to produce joint gains. Yet, countries substituting financial secrecy for the routine reporting of account information lose relative to the status quo ante, as hidden capital flows out, and wage levels and employment decline. Constructivist approaches expect shared regulative norms of sovereignty and nonintervention to prevent major economies from using coercion against noncooperative tax havens. In contrast, I trace tax haven cooperation in multilateral AEI back to a credible threat of economic sanctions from the United States (US). The US the only great power in tax matters for the time being linked access to its financial market to tax haven participation in bilateral AEI. This, in turn, provided the rest of the world with an opportunity to request cooperation in multilateral AEI from them. By comparing three anti-tax haven initiatives of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), I show, moreover, that the US only issues such a sanctions threat when it can shift the costs of regulation to foreign actors, and domestic constraints prevent regressive tax reform. Finally, a nested differences-in-differences analysis reveals that a credible sanctions threat reduces the value of foreign asset holdings in tax havens relative to non-havens. ; Section 7.3 'FATCA's impact on international tax policy' and 7.4 'The lack of reciprocity from the United States' of the PhD thesis draw upon an earlier version published as an article 'The power politics of international tax co-operation : Luxembourg, Austria and the automatic exchange of information' (2015) in the journal 'Journal of European public policy' ; Chapter 1 'Introduction and overview' and 3 'Redistributive tax cooperation' of the PhD thesis draw upon an earlier version published as an article 'Coercion in international tax cooperation : identifying the prerequisites for sanction threats by a great power' (2016) in the journal 'Review of international political economy'
Cities have become crucial actors for the global governance of climate change. Their increased activity in this field is reflected by the rising number of adoptions of local climate strategies in an original sample of 274 European cities from 1992 to 2009. Using event history analysis, I find that this spread is promoted by transnational municipal networks (TMNs) successfully deploying strategies for governance by diffusion, their impact exceeding that of most alternative explanatory factors cited in the literature. Given their capacity to foster the spread of climate policy innovations among cities, TMNs can thus be expected to play a decisive role in a climate governance system that is becoming increasingly fragmented, polycentric, and transnational.
Theories of tax competition predict that small countries competing with large countries benefit, as they find it relatively easy to substitute revenue lost in a tax cut with revenue gained from incoming foreign tax base. If small countries can only lose from tax co-operation, why are Luxembourg and Austria bound to agree to a revised EU Savings Tax Directive that will oblige them to automatically provide information on foreign account holders' interest income to residence countries? Putting emphasis on the neglected issue of power, I show that Luxembourg and Austria were first coerced into bilateral agreements on automatic exchange of information by the United States, which then activated a most-favored nation clause contained in the EU Directive on Administrative Co-operation in Tax Matters. As a result, the two countries were under a legal obligation to also extend greater co-operation to EU partners.
This study aims to assess the governance capacity of Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs) active in climate policy. For this purpose, I perform an Event History Analysis (EHA) and two case studies, testing the impact of network membership on the likelihood of a city adopting a local climate strategy. In a fist step, I develop the argument that TMNs influence their constituent's decision-making through governance by diffusion, meaning that they devise strategies to accelerate policy spread among their members in general, and the spread of local climate strategies in particular. In a second step, I derive a range of alternative explanatory factors from theory, including policy diffusion along regional clusters, the coordinative impact of decisions on superordinate political levels, and local factors like a municipality's financial resources, potential cost savings, and perceived local vulnerability to the repercussions of climate change. I then test these factors against each other. First by performing an EHA on a unique data set containing information on 274 European cities for the time period between 1992 and 2009, and secondly by examining the cases of Hanover and Offenbach, a pioneer and a latecomer in the adoption of a local climate strategy. The results of EHA show that TMN membership is indeed the prime motivator for a city's adoption of a local climate strategy, mainly because networks succeed in facilitating learning processes among their members. Climate policy programs on superordinate political levels are equally important, especially for latecomers. The case studies confirm that TMNs are a key resource of knowledge and expertise for both pioneers and latecomers. Support from the national government did not play a role in Hanover's decision to introduce a local climate strategy, however, it allowed Offenbach to make a qualitative leap in the elaboration of its action plan. Cost savings did not motivate the decision to act on climate change. Rather, it served city administrations as an argument to ...
