Low Taxes Draw Tech Companies to Ireland
Why get mugged?
Dublin's Grand Canal Square, just south of the River Liffey, is known as Googletown. In 2011, Google (GOOG), which employs more than 2,500 people in Ireland, bought the neighborhood's 15-story Montevetro building. Nearby is Facebook's (FB) European headquarters, along with outposts for LinkedIn (LNKD), Yahoo! (YHOO), and other U.S. technology companies, some of them Dublin fixtures for over a decade. They've been drawn to expand there by the strapped government's flat 12.5 percent corporate tax rate.
By comparison, corporate tax rates top out at 35 percent in the U.S., 33 percent in France, and 24 percent in the U.K. "The Irish government has obviously come up with a very, very, shall we say, positive tax scheme," says Petter Made, co-founder of SumUp, a mobile-payments company founded in Berlin that's now headquartered in Dublin and employs about 35 people there.
Hide Comments (0)
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post commentsMute this user?
Ban this user?
Un-ban this user?
Nuke this user?
Un-nuke this user?
Flag this comment?
Un-flag this comment?