Estimating the fiscal effects of base erosion and profit shifting: data availability and analytical issues

The multilateral efforts, led by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to address base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) have attracted much attention from tax policy makers, practitioners and academics. In 2012, the OECD/G20 BEPS Project was launched to address BEPS through a range of international tax policy measures. A key part of the BEPS package was the Action 11 report, which considered the fiscal and economic impacts of BEPS and produced an empirical estimate of the global corporate income tax (CIT) revenue losses arising from BEPS of between 4 per cent and 10 per cent of global CIT revenues. This research note highlights some of the data-related and methodological challenges facing researchers attempting to estimate the fiscal impacts of BEPS, discusses some of the methodological approaches that have recently been applied to this end, and provides a preview of the forthcoming release of the first edition of the OECD Corporate Tax Statistics.