TAX HAVENS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION, THEIR IDENTIFICATION AND USE BY THE MULTINATIONALS

Tax avoidance is currently an important topic and tax havens play a key role in it. Globalisation brings more possibilities of international tax planning therefore the importance of tax havens has increased even rapidly. Although they are called tax havens, the tax legislation is not the most important indicator of better taxation conditions. Multinationals can reach lower effective tax rate by separate agreement with governments therefore it is important to analyse also other indicators. This contribution focuses on the European Union and tax havens, which are member countries of this organization. Data used as variables within selected method address disproportion of some economic indicators in tax havens. As a method, cluster analysis was selected because it is able to separate the group of tax havens. Results show that there is significant difference between EU countries. Five EU countries are identified as tax havens: Luxembourg, Ireland, Netherlands, Malta and Cyprus. These countries report significantly larger flows of foreign direct investments and larger importance of intellectual property or financial sector in their economics. Especially the position of Luxembourg can be named as strong tax haven. On the other hand, the other EU countries have relatively close position to each other in terms of selected variables. Overall, tax havens report asymmetric in several economic indicators, which address international profit shifting and investment activity.