Even minimum corporate taxes wouldn't work, no? You'd also need to make sure there is no way to artificially extract these profits by imposing withholding taxes

Even minimum corporate taxes wouldn't work, no? You'd also need to make sure there is no way to artificially extract these profits by imposing withholding taxes on most transactions inside a specific economic system (i.e. the EU). This seems almost impossible to do. > Companies will end up in court when their definition of an arms-length price/interest rate is significantly higher than what the national tax authority considers to be reasonable. A second issue I see is that smaller countries will often see certain transactions as "at arms length", whereas larger ones (with higher corporate tax rates) will not. But if a multinational can produce valid evidence from, let's say, 3 different jurisdictions that a transaction is at arms length, this will often be accepted by the court as being at arms length. In most countries, the burden is on the tax authority to prove something is not at arms length. So yes, countries are often screwing each other over. Add to that that each country wants to stop avoidance (loss of tax revenue), and at the same time attract investment (by granting fiscal deduction for special interest groups) and you end up with a big mess. This whole tax game is essentially basic arbitrage within a complex framework.