Mark Bowler Smith

Churchill College

UK COMPETITIVENESS, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND CORPORATE TAXATION: Using the Corporation Tax to Promote Increased Resource Productivity in line with the Law and Policy of the European Union

Article 3(3) of the Treaty on European Union mandates the promotion of sustainable development and competitiveness throughout the internal market. Although EU tax policy has thus far neglected these two objectives, it is argued that the UK Corporation Tax could promote them both by incentivising companies to increase their resource productivity. The implication being that increased resource productivity is a necessary condition of both sustainable development and competitiveness, particularly in an EU policy context. Using a tax to promote increased resource productivity means giving that tax a regulatory purpose. The Corporation Tax is already used for a number of regulatory purposes (e.g. incentivising R&D expenditure) and it has a number of qualities that make it suitable for promoting regulatory objectives in general. More specifically, it is capable of promoting increased resource productivity because it is a price-based market instrument and, as such, is capable of discriminating against resource-based corporate inputs. Despite being capable of so doing, it is argued that the current configuration of the Corporation Tax does little to promote increased resource productivity. To show that this is the case, the rules relating to trading income, R&D tax relief, capital allowances for plant and machinery, debt interest deductibility and trade loss relief are all considered. Despite movements in the right direction under both the R&D and plant and machinery regimes, it is argued that some kind of additional relief that promotes increased resource productivity should be introduced into the Corporation Tax. Accordingly, this thesis proposes that the UK Government consider implementing a new kind of statutory tax incentive – the Resource Productivity Tax Credit. The objective of the Resource Productivity Tax Credit is to reward the trades of individual companies, in targeted sectors, for significant improvements in profitability derived from increased resource productivity. The proposed operation of the Resource Productivity Tax Credit is explained and its perceived strengths and weaknesses are highlighted.

Start Date: 2005/10.

End Date: 2011/09.

Qualifications

LLM (Tax) (Distinction) - Queen Mary, University of London, 2004

Bar Vocational Course at Inns of Court School of Law, 1997

LLB, Exeter University, 1993

Employment

Lecturer at the University of the South Pacific, Vanuatu, 2012-

Tax Law Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, 2008-12

Research Assistant at the Centre for Tax Law, University of Cambridge, 2007-08

Some tax law lecturing at Cambridge University and Queen Mary, University of London, 2006-07

Regional Sales Director for nCipher plc in Madrid, 2000-03

Academic Supervisor at Wall Street International in Madrid and Tenerife, 1999-2000

Educational Support at Herbert Smith for the Banking & Capital Markets Group, 1997-99 

Other Information 

AHRC PhD Funding Award, 2006

Drapers’ Company Prize for Academic Excellence in the LLM, 2004 

Fluent in Spanish

Mark Bowler Smith and Huigenia Ostik, "Towards a Classification of the Central London Congestion Charge as a Tax", British Tax Review (2011), no.4, pp.487-508.

Peter Harris

Tom O'Shea and Simon Deakin