Cooperative enterprises engaged in international activities face structural disadvantages under current tax systems, which are primarily designed around corporate models focused on shareholder value and profit distribution. This paper identifies three areas where international tax law fails to accommodate the legal identity and governance logic of cooperatives: bilateral tax treaties, transfer pricing rules, and carbon taxation frameworks. Bilateral tax treaties often exclude cooperatives due to narrow definitions of eligible entities, denying them access to treaty benefits and exposing them to double taxation. The paper proposes the insertion of "cooperative clauses" to explicitly recognize cooperative entities, protect reinvested surpluses, and treat federated structures as unitary economic actors. In the area of transfer pricing, standard arm"s length rules disregard the solidarity-based pricing practices common in cooperative networks. To address this, the article introduces the concept of "solidarity pricing margins" and simplified documentation models aligned with cooperative governance. Finally, carbon taxation regimes tend to favour capitalintensive firms, marginalizing cooperatives despite their strong environmental role. The paper calls for eligibility criteria that reflect democratic ownership and local reinvestment. Together, these reforms aim to align tax law with cooperative identity, promoting legal equity, governance legitimacy, and institutional diversity in support of a democratic and sustainable economic transition.
Filippo Luigi Giambrone (Mon,) studied this question.