From Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute, we learn that two of Canada’s top tax scholars have prepared a bulletin (pdf link here) with calculations of marginal effective corporate tax rates for 80 nations:
Duanjie Chen and Jack Mintz find that the U.S. effective corporate tax rate was the highest in the OECD in 2009, and it was almost twice as high as the 80-nation average. That means that when U.S. companies buy new machines or build new factories, they are at a large tax disadvantage.
The authors conclude that such a high rate ?harms the economy and encourages companies to shift investment and profits abroad to lower-tax jurisdictions.? They also conclude that lowering the U.S. corporate tax rate to 25 percent or so would probably not lose the government any revenue.
