The OECD Multilateral Instrument: Challenge or Opportunity of Multilateralism in International Tax?, in The Aftermath of BEPS (Joanna Wheeler ed., IBFD 2020)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter starts by raising questions about whether the MLI may truly be considered an expression of renewed multilateral fiscal relations. Section 6.2. maintains that this new international agreement amounts, at best, to a form of “weak multilateralism”, despite having resulted from transnational tax policy negotiations that were somewhat more inclusive than the BEPS initiative. The argument is twofold. First, even though the MLI was devised by a larger group of countries, the mandate for its development carefully restricted its scope to implementing the OECD-based Action Plan, which was designed, framed, and organized as a work project by the OECD as part of its mandate to serve OECD member country interests. Second, by all accounts, the MLI was not intended to replace the bilateral tax treaty network with a single uniform global tax regime with substantive rules (as envisioned in the past). On the contrary, it appears to have been designed to be applied alongside covered tax agreements (CTAs), modifying only their application (and may even be viewed as temporary to the extent covered agreements are ultimately renegotiated in the future). Section 6.3., in turn, accepts the MLI’s shortcomings in terms of legitimacy but tries to work with, instead of against it. Put differently, working within the parameters introduced by the OECD, this section advances a legal argument that even though a collective arrangement is different than substantive multilateral governance, the MLI could ultimately be used strategically to achieve the latter at some future date.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".