Abstract
Th eories of fairness in international taxation were not well-developed until recently, in part because equitable taxation might be thought to require an international consensus on the divisions of the right to tax income from cross-border transactions, and this appeared ' diffi cult, if not utopian ' under the prevailing political and economic conditions. 2 Th e recent OECD/G20 BEPS agreement heralds a new era in international tax policy. Th is new era calls for new approaches to fairness in international taxation. Th e dominant twentieth-century approaches to normative analysis of international tax cooperation are not adequate for the new task. Tax neutrality principles such as capital-import neutrality, capital-export neutrality, national neutrality, and capital-ownership neutrality are not well suited to allocating taxing rights or evaluating agreements to limit tax competition. In principle, philosophical theories of distributive justice should come to our aid in providing principles that are not beset by the same ambiguities as tax neutrality principles. In practice, however, the leading theories of distributive justice in political philosophy, including both egalitarian theories and consequentialist theories, seem an awkward fi t for the context of international tax agreements and have had limited infl uence on debates in international tax policy. Much of the best recent normative work in international tax theory takes a more bespoke approach to normative tax theory, drawing on some aspects of the global distributive justice literature but mostly defending tax-specifi c normative principles rather than applying principles from a larger distributive theory to the tax context. 3 1 I am grateful to Alex Houghton for research assistance and to Benita Mathew for editing this chapter.