From the Conversable Economist:
US corporations work their accounting system so that sales and profits
turn up in non-U.S. jurisdictions (for example, here' s description of
the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich
technique). One implication is that corporations pay lower US and
overall taxes; another is that because of this shifting, measured US GDP
is smaller than it would otherwise be.
Karen Dynan and Louise Sheiner provide a nice overview of this mechanism in their essay "GDP as a Measure of Economic Well-being," written for the Hutchins Center at the Brookings Institutions (Working Paper #43, August 2018). Their paper offers a detailed and readable overview of man problems that arise in measurement of real GDP: problems in measuring the size of the digital economy, problems in adjusting for changes in the size of nonmarket work, and potential biases in the measure of inflation (which in turn lead to errors in estimating the size of the real economy), and others.
Here, I'll just focus on their comments about how US multinationals shift sales and profits to other countries (footnotes omitted).
"[T]he rise of global supply chains and the legal latitude that companies have in declaring in which countries their economic activity takes place lend material downward bias to estimates of U.S. nominal GDP. In particular, “transfer pricing” and other practices allow multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in the United States to underprice the sale or lease of intangible assets—such as blueprints, software, or new drug formulas—to affiliates in low-tax jurisdictions so that more of their profits are booked in these countries.
The economic importance of such transactions has been documented in a variety of ways. For instance, in 2012, a Senate subcommittee questioned Microsoft about its agreements to shift some R&D costs and regional royalty rights to affiliates in Singapore and Ireland (U.S. Congress Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 2012). In 2013, the subcommittee found that Apple used favorable transfer pricing agreements to shift billions of dollars of profits from the United States to Ireland (U.S. Congress Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 2013). More generally, Hines (2005) and Lipsey (2006) show that U.S. MNEs register more profits in tax havens than can plausibly be accounted for by economic activity. Jenniges, Mataloni, Stutzman, and Xin (2018) find that U.S. companies that have a cost sharing agreement with a foreign entity appear less productive than similar companies without such an agreement, and foreign companies that have a cost sharing agreement with a parent company in the U.S. appear more productive than similar foreign companies. A 2016 OECD brief described how such transactions drove a 26 percent increase in measured GDP in Ireland in 2015. And, Tørsløv, Wier, and Zucman (2018) estimated that nearly 40 percent of multinational profits are shifted to low-tax countries each year.......MORE
