Planned economies?
Corporations, tax-avoidance and world politics
Ylönen Matti
The power of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) has become a major policy issue and an emerging topic in social sciences. Accounts of corporate tax avoidance, monopolistic practices of big tech companies, and mishandling of data by social media giants permeate the news. However, social scientists and business scholars have struggled to conceptualize the agency and governance of these increasingly powerful supranational entities. I tackle this theme by analyzing the challenges that corporate tax avoidance creates for the established concepts of global governance and for the ways in which MNEs are conceptualized within International Political Economy (IPE).