Escuela de Derecho

The purpose of this seminar is to explore the Latin American asymmetric tax treaty network as a source of public international law governing the tax treatment of cross-border transactions. Asymmetric tax treaties entered into by Argentina , Brazil , Chile , and Mexico are used as case studies. The seminar addresses:

i) the extent to which the  OECD Model Tax Convention on Income and on Capital is applied by major Latin American countries in their tax treaty  network;

ii) the provisions of the UN model most frequently used in the Latin American tax treaty network;

iii) the effective (rather than normative) relevance of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties for tax treaty interpretation purposes in Latin America;

iv) the legal status of tax treaties within the framework of domestic law, in particular, the controversial but increasing practice of implicit treaty overrides and the application of domestic anti-avoidance rules to the Latin American tax treaty network;

v) the main goals commonly sought by Latin American countries when entering into an asymmetric tax treaty vis a vis the unilateral alternative for avoiding international double taxation;

vi)  the current challenges to the bilateral tax treaty network approach and whether a Latin American, multilateral tax treaty would  effectively eliminate them; and

vii) whether the few treaties entered between LA and Asian countries constitute a trend towards greater integration and how to structure cross border transactions between both continents in the meantime.