Fernando Loayza Jordán (Drexel-Kline, Yale) presented “International Tax Peace” on January 6 at the Junior International Law Scholars Association annual meeting at the University of Hawai’i in Honolulu. Here is the abstract:

This Article challenges the prevailing narrative that recent U.S. international tax policies under President Trump marked a rupture from a prior era of international tax peace that was defined by economic liberalism, multilateralism, and certainty. It argues that the international tax order has often been at odds with that characterization, largely due to the US international tax policies. The apparent international tax peace, in fact, masked underlying fiscal coercion towards the Global South under the guise of multilateral cooperation and the absence of open tax conflicts.

To make its case, this piece starts by providing a comprehensive descriptive account of the international tax policies of the Second Trump Administration, to then compare that description to the romanticized version of the international tax order that was allegedly broken. While there are certainly differences in substance and form, they are not as radical as portrayed. In many cases, they are the continuation of US international tax policies.

Then, it employs, for the first time, peace studies theory in international taxation to recharacterize the international tax order and US international tax policies. Understanding international tax peace not as the mere absence of conflict (negative peace) but as the presence of international tax justice (positive peace) highlights how most of the international tax order was not peaceful at all. Just a few of the US tax relations were peaceful, specifically those maintained with other Global North countries. It explains how the rise of the digital economy turned many Global North countries into part of the new digital Global South and triggered tax wars between previous allies.

Instead of proposing a return to the previous tax order, I recommend a path towards a more peaceful international tax order, including specific proposals for the UN Tax Convention currently under negotiation. I stress the need to have a coherent and robust account of corrective justice to inform this path and prevent states from instrumentalizing corrective justice language to entrench tax dominance unilaterally or reject legitimate tax policies as harmful.