Pushkin and Gannibal: Ethnic Identity in Imperial Russia

Since his untimely death in 1837, the nineteenth-century romantic writer Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin has been renowned the world over not only for his literary achievements, but also for being a paradigm of Russianness. However, Pushkin himself was by no means a pure Russian. Like many of the inhabitants of the Russian empire during his time, he was borne of a veritable hodgepodge of ethnicities. The most surprising of these is his African ancestry; his great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was an African slave brought to Russia in the early eighteenth century. Remarkably, this same slave became the godson and close confidante of Peter the Great himself. Although the link to Gannibal and his inspiring story was one of Pushkin’s greatest points of personal vanity, it was also a constant, painful reminder of his disconnection from Russian society and the aristocracy into which he was born

International Tax Reform: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on Fin., 115th Cong., Oct. 3, 2017 (Statement of Itai Grinberg)

Lowering the corporate income tax rate and moving to a territorial system are important to maintain U.S. prosperity and improve growth prospects for our economy. The U.S. cannot stand apart from corporate tax competition in a globalized economy. To ensure that corporate income tax reform maximizes opportunity for well-paid employment for as many of our children and grandchildren as possible, the United States must also level the playing field between U.S. and foreign-headquartered MNCs. Leveling the playing field requires addressing the relative tax advantages available to foreign-owned U.S. corporations that represent one of the most senseless aspects of our current corporate tax code

The Struggle to Create Soviet Opera

It is opera, and opera alone that brings you close to the people, that endears your music to the real public and makes your names popular not only with individual small circles but, under favourable conditions, with the whole people. – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, premier composer of symphonies, ballets, and operas in Imperial Russia in the mid- to late 1800s. Tchaikovsky made this remark while living under a tsarist regime, but the pervasive, democratic, and uniting qualities of opera that he so vividly described appealed to an entirely different party: the Bolsheviks. Rather than discard the “bourgeois” remains of the Russian empire, the newly-anointed Soviet Union and its first leader, Vladimir Lenin, kept in place many artistic institutions such as opera theaters. However, it was not until Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union from about 1925 to 1953, seized the reins of power that any attempt was made to control the artistic content of opera. Realizing, as Tchaikovsky had many years earlier, that the populist nature of opera could more effectively spread cultural and political propaganda to the masses, Stalin embarked on a massive Soviet opera experiment that would last from 1936 until his death. In this experiment, Stalin used opera to both further enhance his growing cult of personality and to attempt to throw off remaining Western influences on Soviet musical development. Despite his best efforts, the brutality and repression of Stalin‘s reign had the effect of crushing promising new composers while propping up banal and obedient musicians whose operas have long since been forgotten. Instead of the massive cultural movement he desired, Stalin‘s operatic experiment failed to deliver even on its most basic promise: the birth of Soviet opera

A Constructive U.S. Counter to EU State Aid Cases

U.S. Treasury officials and members of Congress from both parties have expressed concern that the European Commission’s current state aid investigations are disproportionately targeting U.S.-based multinational enterprises. At the same time, a Treasury official recently suggested in congressional testimony that there are limits to what Treasury can do beyond strongly expressing its concerns to the commission. In that testimony, Treasury’s representative hinted at two specific pressure points: whether the state aid investigations could undermine U.S. tax treaties with EU member states; and whether any assessments paid by the foreign subsidiaries of U.S. MNEs as a result of state aid investigations would be creditable for U.S. income tax purposes

Stabilizing “Pillar One”: Corporate Profit Reallocation in an Uncertain Environment

This paper is about how the world reestablishes international tax order. The paper focuses on the OECD’s work on profit reallocation and asks whether this multilateral effort can be successful in stabilizing the international tax system. The analysis centers on the current leading concepts for reallocating profit among jurisdictions under what is known as “Pillar One” of the OECD work programme. To analyze whether any Pillar One concept can be turned into a stable multilateral regime, it is necessary to specify certain elements of what a proposal to reallocate profits might entail. Accordingly, this paper sets out two strawman proposals. One strawman uses a “market intangibles” concept that explicitly separates routine and residual returns. The other strawman may reach a similar result, but does not explicitly attempt to separate routine and residual returns. Instead, in current OECD parlance, it might be described as a “distribution-based” approach. The paper asks whether either of the two strawmen could be agreed and stabilized multilaterally given the tools of modern international tax diplomacy. I conclude that the current procedural and institutional architecture for cementing international tax relations among states is inadequate to stabilize either of the strawmen. Nevertheless, with certain changes, reestablishing order may be possible. Moreover, I conclude that there are six key structural decisions that impact the ability to stabilize the international tax architecture in any Pillar One approach, and that these decisions are likely to be implicitly made in the course of choosing a political direction for Pillar One work in 2019. The choices made with regard to these decisions determine whether or not it will be possible to stabilize Pillar One. Even if good resolutions are reached along these six dimensions, there are only a couple paths to stabilize the system. One path would involve using every tool in the current OECD arsenal in new and more expansive ways, and then substantially depoliticize international tax matters and remove G20 involvement, such that logics of appropriateness developed among tax administrators isolated from political pressures and acting through transnational networks could lend stability to a new set of rules and principles. Even then, only a few Pillar One compromises could be stabilized this way. The alternative path, which could stabilize a broader range of proposals, requires formalizing the new regime in international law through a true multilateral treaty

The New International Tax Diplomacy

International tax avoidance by multinational corporations is now frontpage news. At its core, the issue is simple: the tax regimes of different countries allow multinational corporations to book much of their income in low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions, and many of their expenses in high-tax jurisdictions, thereby significantly reducing their tax liabilities. In a time of public austerity, citizens and legislators around the world have been more focused on the resulting erosion of the corporate income tax base than ever before. In response, in 2012, the G-20—the gathering of the leaders of the world’s twenty largest economies—launched the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project, the most extensive attempt to change international tax norms since the 1920s. In the course of the BEPS project, the field of international tax has adopted the institutional and procedural architecture for multilateral action used in international financial law. This Article is the first to ask whether that architecture will work in the international tax context. To answer that question, this Article first applies lessons from the international financial law literature to assess international tax agreements that are now being reached through soft-law instruments and procedures comparable to those that characterize international financial law. This initial analysis, which draws from the experience in international financial law, is largely pessimistic. However, this Article then describes how model tax treaty law—although also a form of soft law—is highly effective, and differentiates the political economy of international tax law from that of international financial law. As a result, a key theoretical point emerges: bifurcating analysis of multilateral efforts to change international tax norms into their Model Treaty-based and non-Model Treaty-based components is necessary in order to understand the new regime for international tax governance. At a more practical level, bifurcating the analysis highlights that observers should expect the Model Treaty-based parts of the BEPS project to be implemented, as well as most parts of the project focused on tax transparency. By contrast, sustained international coordination in implementing other dimensions of the project is doubtful. In reaching these conclusions, the Article contributes to the broader international economic governance literature by using a high-profile example from international tax diplomacy to show how underlying legal institutions affect the prospects for implementation of international regulatory agreements