Non-Discrimination in European and Tax Treaty Law

I. S. 310Introduction

State aid is defined as an advantage in any form whatsoever conferred on a selective basis to undertakings by national public authorities. The favorable treatment that is entailed in the process of offering advantages may be direct subsidies or fiscal reliefs, only to certain beneficiaries; this reflects the concept of selectivity. Those discriminatory interventions of States by which they favor “certain undertakings or the production of certain products” pose the same threat for preserving a level playing field in a market as the discriminatory obstacles that occur in legal contexts such as the fundamental freedoms and the non-discrimination prohibition in the context of the OECD Model Tax Convention. The relevance of this contribution in a collection on the general topic of non-discrimination is explained not only because of the theoretical and conceptual proximity among the various set of rules, but also because the examination of selectivity, still a controversial and blurred stage in the State aid review, seems to encompass in its methodology a comparability analysis examination, similar to the one used in the aforementioned legal contexts.

The contribution will ...