After years of negotiations, first solicited by the OECD and then by US President Joe Biden, the international community has reached an agreement on the global minimum tax to be applied to large companies: the corporate tax rate, the tax on the profits of enterprise, will be 15% and will be applied in each country, in proportion to the profits generated on the national territory. G7 finance ministers, meeting face to face in London, therefore untied the knot: the new tax, which will be better defined in the G20, will therefore serve to fight tax havens, also solving the issue of taxing digital giants: "Once there is a global solution - said the British minister Rishi Sunak - on the taxation of the profits of multinationals as a whole, the need for taxation will disappear for the giants of the web”.
The largest global companies, with profit margins of at least 10%, will thus see 20% of all profits above that threshold reallocated and taxed in the countries where they make sales. The agreement is a historic turning point, albeit downwards compared to Biden's initial proposal, which would have wanted a 21% tax, in any case lower than the 25% rate which is currently the lowest among the G7 countries. The idea is therefore to tax less, but everywhere, bypassing tax avoidance and allowing countries like Italy where the tax rate was higher to recover at least all the amount due, even if in a lower percentage. For this very reason, it was the resistance of countries like Ireland is very strong, where today the corporate tax is 12,5% and allows large groups to pay much less, based on the tax location, avoiding however paying taxes in countries where they generate a large part of their profits.
The 15% minimum rate is the result of a compromise, and after all it is not far from Ireland's 12,5%. For Italy and for Europe in general, it would be a not indifferent breath of oxygen: a recent study of the European Tax Observatory, coordinated by the young French economist Gabriel Zucman, has quantified in 50 billion euros in extra annual revenue for the whole of Europe, with a substantial share evidently for countries such as Italy. With a minimum tax rate of 25%, the benefit would have been 170 billion euros each year.
