Economic Globalization, Taxation and Public Expenditures: Evidence From OECD Countries

Abstract

Globalization shapes the fiscal policies of countries, leading to changes in the structure of taxation and public expenditures. According to the theory of international tax competition, as globalization increases, countries use their tax policies to attract more mobile factors, resulting in tax competition. This competition causes capital tax rates to decrease and labor tax rates to increase, which is known as the efficiency effect of globalization. On the other hand, governments expand the welfare state to compensate for the increased economic risks resulting from globalization. This is known as the compensation effect of globalization. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test these hypotheses using a dataset of 26 OECD countries from the period 1990-2020. The study employed the Driscoll-Kraay estimator, which produces reliable estimates with robust standard errors in the presence of heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation, and cross-sectional dependency issues. The results indicate that economic globalization has a negative effect on corporate tax rates and a positive effect on labour tax rates. Additionally, it was observed that a high level of social spending is linked to an increase in economic globalization. These results emphasise that the efficiency effect and the compensation effect coexist and complement each other rather than being rivals. Key words: Globalization, tax competition, public expenditure, panel data JEL Classification: E15, E62, C23