The Tax Sparing Provision Influence: A Credit versus Exempt Investors Analysis

This paper is concerned with the impact of tax sparing provisions on the location choices of multinational enterprises. Special attention is paid to the economic in°uence of tax sparing because the OECD proposal to reconsider the inclusion of this provision in bilateral tax treaties is highly controversial. An empirical analysis is proposed in order to apprehend the effects of tax sparing on both credit and exempt investors, since they do not benefit from the same advantages provided by tax sparing. Using data from 54 developing countries over the 1990-2000, and distinguishing Japanese credit investors from French exempt investors, we first find that the asymmetrical sensitivity between exempt and credit investors relative to foreign corporate taxes is considerably reduced with tax measures accounting for tax sparing. Second, we find that tax sparing provisions have a favorable impact on the location choices of credit investors and have no influence on the location choices of exempt investors. Third, the non-robust significance of both a tax sparing adjusted effective interest tax rate and effective royalties tax rate tends to suggest that tax incentives on passive incomes are not really considered by both credit and exempt investors when making the decision of where to invest.