Tax competition and Leviathan

Attitudes towards downward pressure on tax rates from international tax competition depend on attitudes towards government. This paper synthesises the two extremes which, as in other areas of public finance, have dominated the debate, typically being presented as stark alternatives: the view of government as a Leviathan (from which tax competition emerges as a useful constraint on policy-makers) and the view of government as a benevolent maximiser of their citizens' welfare (from which it emerges as a source of inefficiency). Conditions are derived under which, when policy-makers are neither entirely benevolent nor wholly self-serving, tax coordination benefits the representative citizen.