Crossing a Border – A Comparative Tax Law Study on Consequences of Cross-Border Working in the Öresund and Meuse-Rhine regions

“Crossing a Border” – A Comparative Tax Law Study on Consequences of Cross-Border Working in the Öresund- and the Meuse-Rhine Regions is a doctoral thesis comprising tax law and social security law and focuses on cross-border commuting in the two cross-border regions of the Öresund and Meuse-Rhine. A comparative study is done, comprising the four states of Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. This study includes international tax law (domestic tax law, tax treaty law and EU tax law), EU law and social security law. A theoretical framework comprising coherence, congruence,legal pluralism and polycentricity is applied to the thesis in order to discuss and highlight problems referable to the legal framework applicable to cross-border working.

Problems which are discussed include,for instance, mobile workers (such as artists, athletes, researchers and academics),cross-border working in two or more states at the same time, lacking predictability when anticipating tax- and social security contributions and inadequate coherence and congruence between the tax- and social security systems of the studied states. De lege ferenda proposals are discussed in order to relieve, or lessen, these problems, e.g. Lex Öresund a more extensive proposal aimed to function as an additional supplement to the existing Nordic treaty (in order to supplement the Öresund treaty).

Yvette Lind is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Law, Umeå University