合并政策和税收竞争.docVIP

PAGE 原文： Merger Policy and Tax Competition In many situations governments have sector-specific tax and regulation policies at their disposal to influence the market outcome after a national or an international merger has taken place. We find that whether national or international mergers are more likely to be enacted in the presence of nationally optimal tax policies depends crucially on the ownership structure of firms. When all firms are owned domestically in the premerger situation, non-cooperative tax policies are more efficient in the national merger case and smaller synergy effects are needed for this type of merger to be proposed and cleared. These results are reversed when there is a high degree of foreign firm ownership prior to the merger. Mergers have played a prominent role over the past decade, and international merger activity has grown particularly fast. During the period 1981-1998 the annual number of mergers and acquisitions (MA) has increased more than fivefold and the share of cross-border mergers has reached more than one quarter of the total by the end of this period. This increase in merger activity has led to situations where a national or an international merger have been in direct competition with each other. A recent example has been the bidding race for the leading Spanish electricity provider Endesa, where the German-based E.ON company initially competed with the Spanish-based rival Gas Natural. The Spanish authorities favored the national merger and formulated severe obstacles to an international take-over by E.ON, which was one of the reasons why E.ON eventually withdrew its bid. A different approach has been taken by the British government, which has fully liberalized its electricity market in the early 1990s. In this process, foreign electricity providers (among them E.ON ) took over a large part of the British electricity industry. The British government responded to high profits in this and other privatized industries by imposin