Corporate Tax Games with International Externalities from Public Infrastructure

We construct a model of corporate tax competition in which governments also use public infrastructural investment to attract foreign direct investment, thus enhancing their tax bases. In doing so, we allow for inter-regional infrastructural externalities. Depending on the externality, governments are shown to strategically over- or under-invest in infrastructure. We examine how tax cooperation influences investment in infrastructure and find that welfare may be lower under tax cooperation than under tax competition; this is, in fact, the case when infrastructure is sufficiently effective in raising the tax base and generates a suffi ciently large negative interregional externality