Do not let multinationals wriggle out of paying their due share of tax

IN A REPORT titled Corporate Taxation in the Global Economy published on March 10, the International Monetary Fund suggests that multinational enterprises should pay more tax to low-income countries where they make huge profits from cheap labor and resources. Beijing Youth Daily comments:

Statistics show that the corporate tax paid by multinational enterprises as a proportion of their net profits has dropped constantly over the past 30 years. Once a driver of economic globalization the multinationals have become a cause of the widening development and income gaps between developed and developing countries.

On the one hand, the competition for foreign investments among developing countries has prompted countries to lower the tax requirements for foreign companies. On the other hand, the advancement of new information technology has made tax evasion and profit shifting easier for transnational companies.