I’ll Be Here All Week! The Effect of Autocratic Time Horizons on Signing and Content of Double Tax Agreements

Abstract

Balancing the preferences of developing and developed countries is at the core of current debates concerning international taxation. This study takes a closer look at the domestic actors involved in economic decision making, to better understand why some developing countries engage in the international tax treaty regime, and why others refrain from doing so. It investigates a question not yet covered by the research on double tax agreements. Namely, the effect of an autocrat's expected length of tenure on signing and content. The analysis is based on a Heckman model, to correct for nonrandom sample selection and a brand new Tax treaties explorer dataset (ICTD), covering 2533 double tax agreements in 118 low and lower income countries. This study finds that autocrats with longer time horizons are more likely to sign a double tax agreement, and that this effect is even stronger when the wealth of signatories is more asymmetric. There is too much uncertainty in the results to conclude on how autocratic time horizons affect the content of double tax agreements. However, it might seem as if autocrats with longer time horizons tend to sign double tax agreements with lower thresholds for what constitutes permanent establishment.