The Taxing Road to Sustainable Growth

Resource Productivity and Corporate Taxation

The Taxing Road to Sustainable Growth
This book explores a very practical way in which a tax system might help generate more sustainable economic growth by promoting competitiveness and sustainable development.

Why this book?

This book explores one way in which a tax system might help promote competitiveness and sustainable development. Focusing on the UK corporation tax, it recommends the introduction of a Resource Productivity Tax Credit, where resource productivity is defined as the money value of outputs relative to the money value of material resource and non-renewable energy inputs.

The book is structured such that it first explores the legal mandate to promote competitiveness and sustainable development as contained in article 3(3) of the Treaty of the European Union. It then explores what competitiveness and sustainable development actually mean, particularly in an EU policy context, through the lenses of Europe 2020 and the EU Sustainable Development Strategy. It concludes that not only is there a great deal of common ground between competitiveness and sustainable development, as objectives, but that increasing resource productivity is a necessary means to those shared ends.

After exploring EU tax policy and the relevant rules of the UK corporation tax for evidence of any kind of focus on competitiveness and sustainable development, as well as examining the suitability of corporate income taxes as policy instruments for increasing resource productivity, the book concludes that there is ample scope for a statutory tax incentive to be appended to the UK corporation tax to help fulfil the article 3 mandate.

The headline objective of the Resource Productivity Tax Credit is to promote higher resource productivity in the trading activities of individual companies, in particular targeted sectors, through improvements to the knowledge base of those companies rather than through the increased use of raw materials, non-renewable energy and/or intermediate goods.

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Author(s)

Dr Mark Bowler Smith, LLM (Lond), PhD (Cantab), is a non-practising barrister, tax law academic and private consultant. He is currently a lecturer at the University of the South Pacific, based in Vanuatu. Before that he was a tax law lecturer at the University of Aberdeen.

The Taxing Road to Sustainable Growth
https://doi.org/10.59403/269kfg9
Chapter 1: Introduction
https://doi.org/10.59403/269kfg9001
Chapter 2: Sustainable Development and Competitiveness
https://doi.org/10.59403/269kfg9002
Chapter 3: Corporate Tax Objectives
https://doi.org/10.59403/269kfg9003
Chapter 4: Five Elements of the Corporation Tax
https://doi.org/10.59403/269kfg9004
Chapter 5: The Resource Productivity Tax Credit
https://doi.org/10.59403/269kfg9005
Chapter 6: Conclusion
https://doi.org/10.59403/269kfg9006
Appendix A: Glossary of Terms
https://doi.org/10.59403/269kfg9007
Appendix B: Articles 2 and 3 of the Treaty on European Union
https://doi.org/10.59403/269kfg9008
References
https://doi.org/10.59403/269kfg9009