A Countries' Level of Tax Avoidance. Empirical Investigation of Exemplary Drivers

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Business economics - Review of Business Studies, grade: 1,3, Otto Beisheim School of Management Vallendar, language: English, abstract: This thesis contributes to the large literature of drivers of tax avoidance, for example tax system characteristics or the degree of tax incidence, by investigating which kind of firms drive the discovered difference in tax avoidance between countries. Thereby, it tries to answer the question which kind of firms benefit the most from common tax mechanisms and thus use them the most.
By doing so, this thesis focus on firm characteristics that are not part of the tax system itself, but rather are common characteristics associated with a difference in tax avoidance. Moreover, the research is complemented by investigating some tax related country characteristics to answer the question whether the observed firm-tax avoidance correlations differ depending on certain country-specific factors. The thesis therewith further completes the explanation for the difference between the degree of tax avoidance in different countries.
On January 22, 2019, the German political party Bündnis 90/Die Grünen published a study about the extent of tax avoidance in the European Union, revealing a gap between the effective tax rate paid by companies and the statutory tax rate in their home country. This gap between statutory tax rate and effective tax rate is one way of considering tax avoidance. There are other definitions as well, but overall tax avoidance can be seen as not paying the share of pre-tax income as taxes as intended by the government. In other words, tax avoidance is the attempt to legally reduce the tax burden paid to the government as much as possible.