A New Bottom-Up Perspective in International Tax Cooperation for Sustainable Development

The following pages try to devise a new bottom-up perspective in international tax cooperation for sustainable development. The current debates on how to improve the international tax system and how to facilitate the activities of social and solidarity enterprises are brought together to discover the possible synergies among them. Moreover, some of the efforts made at the European Union level to internationally recognize their intrinsic features and the deserved tax treatment, are considered as an embryo of a promising future transformation at a global scale. In the end, when building a new ecosystem, the fairness of the national tax systems is at a stake. There are sound arguments to proceed fearless and they can be found, for example, in the European Union Court of Justice case law and other recent constitutional decisions. Our paper is structured following a perspective that progressively narrows the territorial scope. First it addresses the worldwide debates on inclusive and effective international tax cooperation, the promotion of the social and solidarity economy for sustainable development, and the role of cooperatives in social development. Then it considers the work carried out by the European Union institutions and the illuminating position of the Italian Constitutional Court. After reviewing all these materials, we reasonably reach a conclusion: in the context of sustainable development, once the social enterprises are delimited, they deserve a homogeneous tax regime. This should be necessarily considered in any option chosen for establishing a new framework for international tax cooperation.