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This is something that I have not seen very much research about (not saying it doesn't exist.) When taxes are high, then "wealthy" people will search for a method to reduce their tax burden. For business owners and employers, there are two large options for reducing tax burden - increasing employee salary, and increasing re-investment (R&D, infrastructure, etc). Both of which are commonly cited as deficient in modern business practices.


For sufficiently large companies, a third option is to create a global corporate structure that minimizes the tax burden. If lawyers + accountants + other fees is considerably less than the tax (which is probably the case for most mid-sized or larger companies), becomes a no-brainer for them.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement for a historic example.


It used to be a no-brainer to go overseas.

But the Double Irish (and similar structuring) is no longer permitted and would be treated as an illegal tax scheme today. (It's grandfathered in for companies already using the structure.)

Generally, between BEAT, GILTI, global transfer pricing policies, and the rise of nationalist economic policies, it's now riskier and more expensive to switch to a global corporate structure than to just keep everything in the US.

I used to do a lot of outbound structuring work, and now (post TCJA) almost everything is inbound, compliance, or restructuring existing foreign operations to more tax-friendly foreign jurisdictions (i.e., moving out of China to Vietname, etc.)




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