Transfer Pricing and Value Creation

S. VIIEditors’ Preface

The present volume of the ”Series on International Tax Law” comprises the Master’s theses of the part-time students attending the 2017–19 class of the postgraduate LL.M. program “International Tax Law” at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business). The general topic this year was “Transfer Pricing and Value Creation”. This was a particularly challenging topic as the study of international tax law often fails to address matters that are perceived as interdisciplinary, or facts-based, which are inherent to transfer pricing and to the notion of value creation. Indeed, the academic study of transfer pricing is still rather scarce and fails to address how enterprises, in fact, apply business profits’ allocation rules that are derived from tax treaties.

Emerging from the OECD/G20 BEPS Project, this new, somewhat fuzzy notion of value creation came to permeate not only transfer pricing language but also wider allocation rules and anti-abuse provisions in international tax law. Students grappled with these notions and worked to situate them within the law of tax treaties, analyzing terms of the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines alongside their factual context. In the in...