| Abstract [eng] |
This thesis critically examines the international double taxation agreement (DTA) regime its historical foundations, legal architecture, operational mechanisms, structural deficiencies, and reform prospects in order to determine whether the bilateral treaty framework is fit for the purposes of the modern global economy. The research employs doctrinal, comparative, and analytical methods, drawing primarily on the OECD Model Tax Convention (2017), the United Nations Model Double Taxation Convention (2021), the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), the OECD/G20 BEPS project documentation, and a wide range of academic scholarship and institutional publications in international tax law and international political economy. The research demonstrates that the bilateral double taxation treaty system, while achieving genuine success in eliminating juridical double taxation in the industrial era, is structurally inadequate to address the three defining challenges of international taxation in the digital era: the digital economy's dissolution of the physical-presence nexus on which the treaty system's jurisdictional categories depend; the systematic exploitation of the treaty network through treaty shopping and BEPS by multinational enterprises; and the inequitable distributional outcomes the system produces for developing countries. The BEPS project and the Two-Pillar Solution are assessed as representing the most ambitious reform efforts in the history of international tax treaty-making but as fundamentally insufficient responses to the structural crisis of the bilateral system, because they seek to modify the mechanics of the system without reconceptualising the foundational premises from which the system's structural deficiencies derive. Pillar One has not achieved treaty form; Pillar Two's minimum rate is insufficient to suppress tax competition effectively; and the US withdrawal from the global tax deal in January 2025 has created profound uncertainty about the future of both pillars. The research concludes that meaningful and durable reform of the international tax system requires a reconceptualization of the governance architecture of international taxation rather than the continued accumulation of technical modifications to the bilateral treaty framework. The institutional vehicle for this reconceptualization is the framework convention on international tax cooperation being developed under United Nations auspices a framework that, if designed with genuine inclusivity and substantive ambition, could provide the legal foundation for the transformation of international tax governance: towards substance-based nexus rules, inclusive multilateral standard-setting, mandatory binding dispute resolution, and an equitable distribution of taxing rights that reflects the economic interests of all states, including the developing and least-developed countries whose fiscal sovereignty has been most compromised by the bilateral treaty system as currently constituted. |
