Professor Daniel N. Shaviro delivers Sat Pal Khattar Professorial Lecture

Professor Daniel N. Shaviro delivered the Sat Pal Khattar Professorial Lecture on 14 January 2020 to a full house at the Moot Court, NUS Law.

The lecture, titled “Digital Services Taxes and The Broader Shift from Determining the Source of Income to Taxing Location-Specific Rents” addressed the declining efficacy of entity-level corporate income taxation, and of such key concepts in its current implementation as transfer pricing and permanent establishment rules, has led countries to look for new ways to reach the often low-taxed global profits of highly profitable (and often American) companies that rely on intangible property and, in some cases, the use of digital platforms. Through novel tax measures such as digital service taxes, some countries are in effect transforming “source” from an ostensible characteristic of income to a signifier of taxing nexus that might possibly be associated with location-specific rents. Both the design issues posed from a unilateral national welfare standpoint, and the strategic issues (both cooperative and competitive) that these new measure raised are still in the early stages of playing out.

About Professor Daniel N. Shaviro

Before entering law teaching, Daniel Shaviro spent three years in private practice at Caplin & Drysdale, a leading tax specialty firm, and three years as Legislation Attorney at the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation, where he worked extensively on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. In 1987, Shaviro began his teaching career at the University of Chicago Law School, and joined the New York University School of Law in 1995.

Shaviro’s scholarly work examines tax policy, budget policy, and entitlements issues. Books he has published include Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax (2009), Taxes, Spending, and the U.S. Government’s March Towards Bankruptcy (2007), Who Should Pay for Medicare? (2004), Making Sense of Social Security Reform (2000), When Rules Change: An Economic and Political Analysis of Transition Relief and Retroactivity (2000), and Do Deficits Matter? (1997). He has also published a novel, Getting It (2010).