Taxing Ghosts: Closing Residency Loopholes to Fund Post-Pandemic Recovery Efforts

从2019冠状病毒病大流行中恢复取决于政府寻找资源为基本公共服务提供资金的能力。大多数政府将需要通过增加税收来实现这一目标。然而，富裕的个人已经变得不可能有效征税，因为他们越来越有能力将自己的合法居住地操纵到避税天堂所在地，实际上是“逃避”了他们共同受益的税收制度。跨国公司通常在税收优惠的格式和地点登记利润，使其建立和维护的系统变得模糊，使其存在和盈利成为可能。“鬼影”是一种全球现象，对富国和穷国都有影响，但它对发展中国家的巨大影响使其成为对全球经济稳定的系统性威胁，并在世界各国表现为财政危机。目前在国际层面上传播的改革建议侧重于全球主导（主要是富裕）国家的具体需求，没有充分考虑到“幽灵”问题是一种系统性的全球现象，必须直接解决这一问题，以建立一个既能实现当前后疫情时期的复苏，又能为未来的大流行和其他财政冲击做好准备的税收体系。本项目的重点是国际税收改革议程，该议程阐明了回避的系统性问题，并展示了解决这一问题所需的程序和实质性改革。我们的研究的意义在于我们的整体，系统为基础的方法，借鉴研究和专业知识，从法律，社会学，国际移民研究和非洲发展研究，全面检查相关的法律和地缘政治因素。我们将研究促进富裕个人和公司“避税”的国内和国际因素，展示这种“避税”造成的不同经济威胁，分析各州迄今未能认识到这些威胁的原因，并根据我们的研究结果提出新颖而可行的政策解决方案。

Recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic depends on the ability of governments to find resources to fund essential public services. Most governments will need to do so by raising tax revenues. However, wealthy individuals have become impossible to tax effectively, as they are increasingly able to manipulate their legal residence into tax haven locations, in effect "ghosting" the tax systems from which they collectively benefit. Multinational corporations routinely book profits in tax favorable formats and locations, ghosting the very systems that have been built and maintained to make their existence and profitability possible. Ghosting is a global phenomenon that affects states both rich and poor, but its outsize impact on developing countries makes it a systemic threat to global economic stability, materializing into fiscal crisis in countries around the world. Reform proposals currently circulating at the international level focus on the specific needs of globally dominant (mostly wealthy) states, and do not fully contemplate the problem of ghosting as a systemic, worldwide phenomenon that must be addressed directly to build a tax system that will both enable the current post-Covid recovery and prepare for future pandemics and other fiscal shocks.This project focuses on the international tax reform agenda that illuminates the systemic problem of ghosting and demonstrates the procedural and substantive reforms needed to address it. The significance of our research lies in our holistic, system-based approach, drawing on research and expertise from law, sociology, international migration studies, and African development studies to examine relevant legal and geo-political factors comprehensively. We will research the national and international factors that facilitate tax ghosting by wealthy individuals and corporations, demonstrate the disparate economic threats created by such tax ghosting, analyze why states have failed to recognize the threats to date, and propose novel yet feasible policy solutions based on our findings.