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There are obvious disadvantages with studies of studies. If you include lousy studies, you get lousy results. If you include old studies, you may get results that no longer hold. In fact, the 1:1.5 ratio is more what’s been happening lately. Older studies produced a smaller effect, which suggests firms may be getting better at tax-gaming their income around.

There’s also the problem — a problem with all averages — that no single country/tax rate/profit relationship may exhibit exactly this 1-to-1.5 responsiveness. Some might be more sensitive, others less. Intuition says that for two countries so intimately enmeshed as the U.S. and Canada, with so many companies operating on both sides of the border, sensitivity might be on the higher side of 1:1.5. But that’s surmise. The IMF paper doesn’t say so.

It does say how companies cause their profits to move to where they are taxed less. Among what must be hundreds of techniques, they can: raise the price of goods they ship to subsidiaries in high-tax countries, thus boosting their costs there; do R&D in high-tax countries but move patent rights to low-tax ones; lend money to high-taxed subsidiaries with interest going to low-taxed ones; shop around for the most favourable tax treaties; defer repatriating taxes; do a corporate inversion; move their headquarters, and so on and so on, not quite ad infinitum.

Countries will try to police these often-legal ways of avoiding taxes but who’s going to be more persistently and imaginatively inventive: high-priced tax lawyers or much lower-salaried government tax auditors (however stalwart and dutiful they may be)? And what does it say about who’s winning the regulation game that tax sensitivity seems to be rising?

One slightly reassuring aspect of this study is that it focuses mainly on non-real events — i.e., on changes in how income is reported, not actually on the real economic activity actually taking place. But it’s not all that heartening that a country may keep the jobs and investments but lose its claim on profits. And of course in some cases it may lose all three.