'When a country is in trouble, you can’t have a polarized political process,' Kent said. | REUTERS Coke CEO: China welcomes business

The United States is becoming less business-friendly than China, Coca-Cola’s CEO said Tuesday, citing what he saw as political paralysis and a flawed tax structure.

Coke CEO Muhtar Kent told the Financial Times that U.S. states don’t fight one another for investment opportunities, while Chinese provinces clamor to compete for foreign investments. “In the West, we’re forgetting what really worked 20 years ago. In China and other markets around the world, you see the kind of attention to detail about how business works and how business creates employment,” he said.


Kent said that gridlock in Washington was worsening at exactly the wrong time. “When a country is in trouble, you can’t have a polarized political process,” he said. “There’s too much comfort. We need more needles to stick in politicians.”

Political stalemates are preventing the United States from addressing an archaic and inefficient tax system, Kent argued. “I believe the U.S. owes itself to create a 21st century tax policy for individuals as well as businesses,” he said.

Kent also called the American policy of taxing companies that bring back earned cash from overseas unproductive. “If you talk about an American company doing business in the world today with its Chinese, Russian, European or Japanese counterparts, of course we’re disadvantaged,” Kent said. “A Chinese or Swiss company can do whatever it wants with those funds [earned overseas]. When we want to bring them back, we are faced with a very large tax burden.”

But Chinese officials haven’t always given Coca-Cola the green light, either. Two years ago, China rejected the company’s proposed $2.4 billion acquisition of a Chinese juice manufacturer.

Still, Coke has been aggressively expanding in China - it announced a month ago that it would invest $4 billion there over the next three years. Coke has spent $1.3 billion in capital assets in North America this year.

Coca-Cola is multinational corporation headquartered in Atlanta, Ga., and brought in over $35 billion of revenue in 2010. The company employs 139,000 staff worldwide and is one of 30 companies listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

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