Tax Competition between Unitary and Federal Countries

We analyse taxation of capital in a two-country model, where one country is unitary while the other one is federal, consisting of two identical regions. Both national and regional governments levy a tax on capital. The countries play a noncooperative game between them, with the government of the federal country acting as a Stackelberg leader with respect to its regional governments. We show under what circumstances, at equilibrium, the federal country sets its tax rate inefficiently low, while the unitary country sets it inefficiently high. JEL Classification H23 ・ H77 ・ H87