Rifat Azam (Reichman U.), The United States, China, and the OECD-UN Rivalry: Asymmetric Regime Complexity in Global Tax Governance, 120 Am. J. Int’l L. 445 (2026):
This Article argues that international tax law has developed the characteristics of an asymmetric regime complex; contests over its normative content are playing out simultaneously in the OECD and in the UN. The OECD provides technical rulemaking capacity, while the UN serves to address claims about legitimacy and equity. Powerful states—especially China and the United States—have been exploiting the overlap between the two institutional arenas to try to press their competing visions for domestic and international tax governance.
From the conclusion:
International tax law is moving neither toward a unified multilateral regime nor toward simple fragmentation. This Article has argued that contemporary global tax governance is better understood as an asymmetric regime complex: a non-hierarchical but stratified legal order in which the OECD, the United Nations, and major states occupy overlapping yet functionally differentiated positions, and exercise non-equivalent forms of authority. On this account, what defines the contemporary tax order, is not institutional overlap alone, but the durable division of technical, political, and implementation authority across sites whose interaction generates coordination, contestation, and legal change.
That perspective helps explain a series of developments that otherwise appear difficult to reconcile. . . .
The broader lesson, then, is that contemporary global tax governance should be understood neither as a failed search for unity nor as a temporary episode of fragmentation. It is crystallizing into a durable but contested order in which institutional rivalry has become part of the ordinary operation of the law, technical coordination persists, and distributive conflict remains open. To understand that order is not only to understand the current transformation of international tax. It is also to see more clearly how international legal authority is produced in a multipolar age. . . .
