Taxation and Deglobalisation: Public Lecture by Professor Reuven Avi-Yonah

Since 2016, the world has been undergoing deglobalisation, as evidenced by rising tariffs, limits on immigration, and the potential revival of exchange controls. The downsides of deglobalisation in the form of shrinking GDP and higher inflation, and the possibility of a global recession, are clear. But there is also a potential upside if countries are willing to implement it: Deglobalisation makes it possible to rebuild the tattered social safety net by both raising revenue through tariffs and once again taxing the rich and multinationals. Instead of solving the trilemma among globalisation, tax competition, and the social safety net by limiting tax competition, it can be solved by limiting globalisation, which makes it possible to raise taxes without risking erosion from tax competition and capital mobility.

This lecture's subject matter, delivered by one of the world’s leading tax academics (and possibly the most influential one), will have enormous interest to academics, non-tax academics, tax practitioners, and policymakers (Inland Revenue and Treasury). It will help to start a discussion in New Zealand about the tax policy strategy the country urgently needs after the OECD, on which guidance New Zealand tax policymakers have been relying for decades, has failed to address the tax challenges of digitalisation and many other issues that have a direct impact on New Zealand’s tax base. New Zealand tax policy-making needs a reset, and Professor Reuven Avi-Yonah is one who can encourage it.

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah is the Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He specializes in corporate and international taxation and has served as a consultant to the US Department of the Treasury and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on tax competition.

Avi-Yonah is a member of the American Law Institute, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the American College of Tax Counsel, and an international research fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Business Taxation. In addition to prior teaching appointments at Harvard University (law) and Boston College (history), he has practiced law with Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy in New York; with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York; and with Ropes & Gray in Boston.

He has published more than 250 books and articles, including The International Tax Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Advanced Introduction to International Tax Law (Elgar, 2019), Global Perspectives on Income Taxation Law (Oxford University Press, 2011), and International Tax as International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2007).