How countries learn to tax; Complexity, legal transplants and legal culture, 25 February to 1 March 2019: Workshop report

Grant, A.; Heitmüller, F.

The workshop touched upon a multitude of topics. These can be subsumed under the following main headers:
It included methodological considerations around doing comparative law and combining methods of comparative law with methods from other fields such as history, political science, sociology, computer science and accounting research.
Empirically, it focused on understanding how a transplant process actually works and why it takes place, i.e. who the actors are that make a transplant happen. This included meso-level perspectives, focusing on actors such as bureaucracies, experts, lawmakers, companies, accounting firms and others, but also perspectives which focused more on states as a whole and their role as norm makers and takers. The analyses thereby drew from experiences from many different countries around the world and included a number of historical perspectives as well. The participants also discussed evidence on the extent to which convergence is occurring,...Show moreThe workshop touched upon a multitude of topics. These can be subsumed under the following main headers:
It included methodological considerations around doing comparative law and combining methods of comparative law with methods from other fields such as history, political science, sociology, computer science and accounting research.
Empirically, it focused on understanding how a transplant process actually works and why it takes place, i.e. who the actors are that make a transplant happen. This included meso-level perspectives, focusing on actors such as bureaucracies, experts, lawmakers, companies, accounting firms and others, but also perspectives which focused more on states as a whole and their role as norm makers and takers. The analyses thereby drew from experiences from many different countries around the world and included a number of historical perspectives as well. The participants also discussed evidence on the extent to which convergence is occurring, using the example of the tax treaty system and the implementation of the BEPS standards.
Theoretically, several key concepts were discussed such as the notion of “expertise”, “international standard”, the concept of “transplant” itself and possible alternative metaphors as well as the history of the idea. It was also examined how one can approach the empirical fact of transplants or international convergence of rules from a normative and philosophical point of view.
This document reports the discussions that took place during the five days in a chronological manner. The last section contains an outline of possible topics and approaches for a follow-up workshop.
The report does not systematically differentiate between individual opinions that not everyone might share and consensus. It rather reports which bits and pieces of the debates caught the attention of the reporters and other note takers. It may therefore rather be seen as something stimulating further discussion than a fixed document.Show less

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How countries learn to tax; Complexity, legal transplants and legal culture, 25 February to 1 March 2019: Workshop report

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