Published in the journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, this column by Siegfried Hecker is based on content in his 2016 book, Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Greatest Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers:

The first Russian explosive device to land on US soil wasn’t delivered by a Russian missile, as Americans feared might happen throughout the Cold War. It was delivered by FedEx. The device, an explosive magnetic flux compression generator, arrived at Los Alamos National Laboratory in late 1993, shipped from the Russian Federal Nuclear Center VNIIEF. It allowed Los Alamos and VNIIEF scientists to conduct a groundbreaking joint experiment to study high-temperature superconductivity in ultra-high magnetic fields. 

The shared excitement and jubilation the scientists involved felt over successful experiments like this were testament to a profound shift. Less than two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and some 18 months after the remarkable and improbable exchange visits between Russian and American nuclear weapons lab directors, scientists from Los Alamos and VNIIEF were conducting experiments at each other’s previously highly secret sites. Some of these scientists had helped design their country’s hydrogen bombs. Now, they were focused on fundamental scientific discovery. 

The Soviet nuclear weapons program was built on the shoulders of scientific giants—Yuli B. Khariton, Igor V. Kurchatov, Igor E. Tamm, Andrey D. Sakharov, Yakov B. Zeldovich, and many others—just as the American program was built on the shoulders of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and many more. Unlike their American counterparts, though, Soviet weapons scientists labored in secrecy during the Cold War. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain, curiosity about US research and a pent-up desire to cooperate internationally led them to reach out to the American nuclear weapons labs during the last three years of the USSR. They did so at international conferences and during first-time lab exchanges, long before Washington was prepared for such collaborations. 

Scientific cooperation tapped into the most basic interest of scientists and engineers on both sides, namely, the desire to create new knowledge and technologies. Science is fundamentally an interactive, cooperative pursuit, which requires exposing the results of research to review and critique. As a participant in those early exchanges, I can say that the common language of science allowed us to more easily cross cultures and borders. The two sides’ expertise and facilities proved enormously synergistic, resulting in remarkable progress in several areas of science that neither side alone could have produced for some time to come. We found science, unlike politics, to be a unifying force—one that allowed us to build trust through collaboration.

The pursuit of fusion

High-energy-density physics was the first—and over the years, most intense—area of cooperation between US and Russian nuclear labs. The field involves studying materials at high densities, extreme pressures, and high temperatures, such as those found in stars and the cores of giant planets. On Earth, these conditions are found in nuclear detonations, the basic physics of which were obviously of great interest to the scientists involved. 

Working together, they used VNIIEF explosive magnetic flux compression generators in Russia, VNIIEF generators sent by FedEX from Russia to the United States and charged with US-supplied explosives, and stationary pulsed-power machines at Los Alamos to produce ultra-high electrical currents and magnetic fields that, in turn, produced a wide range of high-energy density environments. This technology provided the capability needed to pursue a unique approach to civilian nuclear fusion, which has tantalized the international physics community for decades with its potential to provide unlimited clean energy. Such energy densities also enabled the scientists to study materials strength under extreme conditions, material behavior under super-strong magnetic fields, and many other problems.

In fact, the initial Los Alamos interest in VNIIEF flux compression technology was stimulated by VNIIEF’s approach to an emerging energy research area now called magnetized target fusion, as Los Alamos scientists I.R. Lindemuth and R. R. Reinovsky and VNIIEF scientist S.F. Garanin write in Doomed to Cooperate. Magnetized target fusion is an approach to fusion that relies on intermediate fuel densities, between the more conventional magnetically confined fusion and inertially confined fusion. 

High-energy-density physics is exciting science that helps attract talent, especially young recruits. It represents a non-military outlet for creative weapon scientists to solve big-world problems for the benefit of mankind. It allows scientists to create new knowledge, not just try to prevent potential new nuclear dangers. It also opened the door to cooperation by scientists with complimentary skills. The Russian side excelled in the design of the explosive generators, the American side in instrumentation and diagnostics, allowing the partnership to go beyond what had been achieved before by either side alone. For example, in the mid-1990s VNIIEF scientists produced a world-record magnetic field of 28 million gauss, some 50 million times larger than the magnetic field at the earth’s surface. Moreover, many of the joint high-field experiments were considered the best-instrumented ever. US-Russian collaborations on high-energy-density physics between 1993 and 2013 resulted in over 400 joint publications and presentations, and opened the door for joint work in other areas. 

An enigmatic element

Plutonium science was similarly of great interest to both sides, yet direct collaboration was not established until the late 1990s because of the sensitivity of the subject. Some fundamental aspects of plutonium science were first presented by Americans and Soviets at the Geneva International Conferences on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955 and 1958. However, the US and Russian results presented in these and subsequent meetings differed dramatically, and the differences were not resolved until we established direct lab-to-lab collaborations. 

By the early 1990s, both sides had for decades attempted to understand plutonium, a complex metal that exhibits six solid crystallographic phases at ambient pressure. Its phases are notoriously unstable, affected by temperature, pressure, chemical additions, and time (the latter because of the radioactive decay of plutonium). With little provocation, the metal can change its density by as much as 25 percent. It can be as brittle as glass or as malleable as aluminum; it expands when it solidifies, and its freshly machined surface will tarnish in minutes. It challenges our understanding of chemical bonding in heavy element metals, compounds, and complexes. Indeed, plutonium is the most challenging element.

Several of my Russian counterparts and I have devoted much of our 50 years of scientific endeavor attempting to understand the properties of this enigmatic metal.American and Russian scientists had disagreed for 40 years on how to tame plutonium’s notorious instability, when, in 1998, I began working with Lidia Timofeeva, the preeminent Russian plutonium metallurgist. The end of the Cold War enabled us to talk, challenge each other’s views, and finally understand this element better. Our joint work demonstrated the validity of Russian research finding that a high-temperature phase of plutonium could be retained at room temperature, but not stabilized, by adding small amounts of gallium. (We published the results in a paper called “A Tale of Two Diagrams.”) US-Russian collaboration at more than a dozen plutonium science workshops continued for 15 years. 

Computing power

Computational methods for massively parallel computing became a third important topic of scientific collaboration. During the 1992 US lab directors’ visit to Sarov, I was surprised by VNIIEF’s computational capabilities. Soviet computers were known to be greatly inferior to US supercomputers, the most powerful of which resided at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories. Yet their three-dimensional simulations of a representative ballistic impact problem were extraordinary. When I marveled at my counterparts’ computing abilities, one of them explained, “since we don’t have the computing power you have, we have to think harder”—and they did. More than one thousand specialists worked in VNIIEF’s Mathematical Department, including some of the most gifted Russian mathematicians and computer scientists. 

Because only low-performing, single-central processing unit (CPU) computers were available to Russia’s scientific institutes, in the 1970s VNIIEF began to physically link CPUs and create parallel software algorithms that efficiently used multiple CPUs to greatly accelerate simulations for problems such as hydrodynamics, heat conduction, and radiation transport. They confirmed the efficiency of their parallelization strategies on computers with up to 10 CPUs, the most they could link at the time. They also developed analytical models for predicting the scaling efficiency to arbitrarily large numbers of processors.

During this time, the American labs were just beginning to transition their nuclear simulation codes from powerful single-CPU computers to the massively parallel computers that were becoming commercially available, a transition the Russian side had accomplished years earlier but with fewer and less powerful CPUs. Our collaborations gave Americans access to proven parallelizing algorithms, and gave Russians the ability to evaluate different analytical models for predicting the scaling efficiency to large numbers of processors. This same technology would later prove critical to both US and Russian programs for maintaining their arsenals after nuclear tests were banned.

Allowing the nuclear weapons scientists to move out of the shadow of Cold-War secrecy through scientific collaborations made us realize how much we were alike. It helped build trust, which had a powerful impact on enhancing nuclear security because it allowed us to extend our collaboration into sensitive subject areas, like the safety and security of nuclear weapons and materials. For the nuclear weapons scientists, the progression from science to security was a natural evolution, since we had practiced both from the beginning of our nation’s nuclear programs. It also fulfilled our desire to apply our skills to enhance scientific progress.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Siegfried S. Hecker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6468, shecker@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

In Nikkei Shimbun, Takeo Hoshi gave his analysis of the border adjustment tax and its potential impact on domestic and international economic policies.

The article was republished with permission and is available in English and Japanese below.

Two months have passed since Donald Trump entered the White House, and the direction of his international economic policies is gradually becoming clearer. On his first full day in office, he signed a presidential order pulling the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, strategically steering the country away from multinational trade agreements—through which the United States had led the way in writing the rules of international commerce—and toward bilateral pacts with the aim of giving the country an advantage over foreign competitors.

Often considered part of this more protectionist approach is the administration’s push to introduce what is known as a border adjustment tax, which the Republican Party has been advocating. Trump himself initially rejected the tax as being too complex but has recently begun to support it. Because the tax is applied to imports but not to exports, some see it as a mercantilist tool to promote sales of domestic goods and services in overseas markets while keeping out imports. Should Washington embrace such a tax, other governments may be prompted to reciprocate with protectionist policies of their own, raising the specter of shrinking global trade.

Is It Really Protectionist?

On closer inspection, though, the border adjustment tax is actually not a trade-distorting mechanism but part of fundamental tax reform. This article will examine the implications of this tax using a number of simple, hypothetical examples. The impetus for such an examination was provided by a series of articles authored by members of the Tokyo Foundation’s Tax and Social Security Policy Committee (Japanese only), led by Senior Fellow Shigeki Morinobu.

The border adjustment tax, properly speaking, is part of a “destination-based cash flow tax” (DBCFT). As the name suggests, there are two basic components to the DBCFT.

The first is the “destination-based” element, meaning that the tax is levied in the country of consumption rather than of origin. Japan’s consumption tax and other forms of value added taxes all follow this principle, as exports are untaxed, while imports are taxed. The tax now being debated in the United States is an attempt to apply the destination-based idea to corporate taxes.

The other is the “cash flow” element, which taxes the profits defined as actual receipts minus actual payments. One important difference of this approach from current corporate tax practices is that companies would be able to deduct the full amount spent on capital investment during that year, instead of depreciating it over the useful life of a tangible asset. By providing immediate relief, the DBCFT is likely to encourage corporate investment. Here, though, I will concentrate my discussion on the impact of the destination-based element of the tax.

The destination-based element, as noted above, leads to “border adjustment,” inasmuch as the tax is applied to domestic consumption and excludes goods or services produced at home but are consumed abroad. To elucidate what this entails, let us see how the DBCFT would affect the after-tax income using a simple example of a vertically integrated corporate group with three stages of production, depicted in the table. We will first assume that the corporate tax rate is 20%.

(1) The material supply producer sells raw materials for $5 million, of which $3 million is paid as labor, leaving a profit of $2 million.

(2) The intermediate goods producer purchases the raw materials for $5 million and processes them into intermediate inputs worth $8 million. Workers are paid $1.8 million for a profit of $1.2 million.

(3) The final goods producer purchases the intermediate inputs for $8 million and assembles them into final goods, which are sold to consumers at $10 million, paying workers $1 million and registering a profit of $1 million.

Group Profit after Border Adjustment Tax ($ million)

Note: No border adjustment for overseas production.

Let us first look at what this corporate group would owe the tax authorities under the current corporate tax system. When all three stages of production take place domestically, the three companies would be required to pay 20% of their profits as corporate tax. Together, the three companies earn $4.2 million ($2 million + $1.2 million +$1 million) in profits. After paying 20%, they would be left with after-tax income of $3.36 ($4.2 million × 0.8).

Current System Encourages Multinationals to Move Offshore

How would the amount the group pays in taxes change if it chose to relocate its intermediate goods production to a country with a corporate tax rate of, say, 10%? The lower taxes would mean that the after-tax income of the group as a whole would now rise to $3.48 million ([$2 million +$1 million] × 0.8 + $1.2 million × 0.9). The group would thus have an incentive to move its operations overseas. In other words, the current US tax system has a distorting effect in encouraging multinationals to move to countries offering lower corporate tax rates.

The border adjustment tax can rectify the distortion by eliminating this incentive, as shown in the right-hand column of the table. If the group ships raw materials to the intermediate goods company located in a different country, the group’s tax base, adjusted at the border, would decline by $5 million (exports are not included in taxable revenue) and correspondingly rise by $8 million (imports are taxed) as the offshore affiliate ships the intermediate goods to be assembled and sold as final products. With a corporate tax rate of 20%, the group as a whole would see its after-tax income decline to $2.88 million ([$2 million + $1 million] ×0.8 – [$8 million − $5 million] × 0.2 + $1.2 million × 0.9) despite a lower corporate rate for the intermediate goods company. Note that the second term of the equation represents the border adjustment tax.

As the example shows, a border adjustment tax will eliminate the financial benefits of relocating abroad, as companies will gain nothing from the lower tax rates in other countries.

The same goes for countries where lower wage levels prevail. To see this, let us consider a case where the corporate group can benefit from lower labor costs overseas. Suppose that producing intermediate goods domestically costs $1.8 million in labor but that this cost is reduced to $1.3 million at an offshore plant. For simplicity’s sake, we will assume that the $500,000 in lower expenses boosts profit at the intermediate goods company to $1.7 million.

In the absence of border adjustment, a business would have an incentive to relocate to a country with lower wages even if the corporate tax rate were the same. Such advantages disappear, though, in the face of border adjustment; in the above example, the group would see its after-tax income fall to $3.16 million ([$2 million + $1 million] ×0.8 – [$8 million − $5 million] × 0.2 + $1.7 million × 0.8). Here we are assuming that the corporate tax rate in the foreign country is the same 20%. The after-tax income with border adjustment is less than the $3.36 million the business would have earned had it kept production at home.

Destination-Based Principle

These calculations are premised on the foreign country using the origin-based approach to corporate taxation, rather than the destination-based principle. If the offshore plant, too, is subject to border adjustment, then its sales (exports) would be untaxed and only its purchases (imports) taxed. In such a situation, its after-tax income would rise to $1.96 ($1.7 × 0.8 – [$5 million − $8 million] × 0.2) even with a corporate tax rate of 20%, boosting the income of the group as a whole to $3.76 million.

Should the Trump administration embrace the destination-based approach, therefore, other governments would have an incentive to follow suit. In fact, most proponents of the border adjustment tax in the United States argue that the lack of such a tax puts the country at an unfair disadvantage vis-à-vis markets that have value-added taxes.

I hope these examples will help show that the border adjustment tax is not a protectionist measure. It can be considered part of the Trump administration’s efforts to maintain US competitiveness as the world increasingly turns from origin-based tax systems to destination-based systems.

As the failed Obamacare repeal effort suggests, though, the White House’s ability to push policies through Congress appears dubious. That said, the global trend toward the destination-based tax systems is undeniable, and the introduction of a border adjustment tax will continue to be a topic of political debate in the United States. Japan has a value-added tax in the form of the 8% consumption tax, but its corporate tax has no border adjustments. Tokyo, too, needs to review the current tax system critically, including the possibility of introducing border adjustments to its corporate tax, as the day Washington goes forward with tax reform may not be far off.

(Translated from “Kokkyo-chosei-zei, kakkoku zeisei ni eikyo,” Keizai Kyoshitsu, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, March 30, 2017.)

トランポノミクスの行方（上）国境調整税、各国税制に影響―海外移転促すゆがみ是正

   トランプ米政権の発足から２カ月が過ぎた。経済政策に関して一つ明確になったのは国際経済政策だろう。環太平洋経済連携協定（ＴＰＰ）など多国間での国際経済活動に関する包括的なルールを構築するために指導的な役割を果たそうとする政策から、２国間で米国が有利になるような国際経済交渉を戦略的に進める政策へと移行した。

   保護貿易政策の一つとして取り上げられるのが国境調整税だ。もともと共和党が推していた政策で、トランプ大統領自身は複雑すぎるとして当初難色を示していたが、最近ではホワイトハウスも支持し始めたようだ。輸入品に課税する一方、輸出品は課税対象にならないので、輸出を促進し、輸入を抑える重商主義的な政策とされる。もし米国がそうした政策をとるなら、他国もそれに対抗して保護貿易的な政策をとり、世界貿易は収縮のスパイラルに陥ってしまう。これは由々しきことだ。  

   筆者もそう考えていたが、国境調整税の中身を検討すると、本質は貿易政策ではなく、根本的な税制改革の一部であり、その観点からとらえる必要があることが分かる。本稿では国境調整税の仕組みを簡単な例を使いながら考える。東京財団の税・社会保障調査会の森信茂樹・中央大教授、田近栄治・成城大特任教授、佐藤主光・一橋大教授による一連の論考が契機となった。
 

   そもそも国境調整税は正確には「仕向け地主義キャッシュフロー課税」の一部だ。名前の通り、こうした課税の仕方には２つの特徴がある。 　

   一つは「仕向け地主義」だ。財が消費される場所（国）で課税対象が決まることで、生産の場所で課税対象が決まる「源泉地主義」と区別される。日本の消費税も含めて付加価値税は仕向け地主義の税制の分かりやすい一例だ。実際、付加価値税に関しては国境調整が行われている。輸出は課税されず、輸入は課税される。そうした仕向け地主義を法人税に適用しようとするのが現在の米国での議論だ。 　

   もう一つは「キャッシュフロー課税」だ。実際に手元に入る売り上げから実際に支払われた費用を引いたキャッシュフローに課税する。例えば現在の法人税では設備投資の際に、その減耗分だけを何年かにわたり控除するが、キャッシュフロー課税では投資した年に投資額をすべて控除できるようになる。これは投資を促進する効果を持つが、本稿では仕向け地主義の国境調整の方に議論を集中する。 　

   国境調整の意味を理解するため、次のような３段階の生産過程を垂直に統合した企業の例を考える。法人税率は２０％で、最終消費財はすべて国内で消費されると仮定する。 　
   ①材料部門は労働を投入して５００万ドルの価値の原材料を作り出す。３００万ドルを労働者に支払い、２００万ドルの利益が生まれる。 　
   ②中間財部門は原材料を５００万ドルで仕入れて加工し、８００万ドルの中間財を生産する。１８０万ドルを労働者に払い、利益は１２０万ドルだ。 　
   ③消費財部門は中間財を８００万ドルで仕入れて加工し生産物を消費者に１千万ドルで売る。１００万ドルを労働者に払い、利益は１００万ドルになる。 この例を使って、国境調整を含まない米国の現行税制では企業が生産過程の一部を法人税率の低い外国に移転するインセンティブ（誘因）があることを示せる。  

   まず３つの生産過程すべてが国内で行われる場合には、法人税率は２０％なので、企業全体の税引き後利益は（２００万＋１２０万＋１００万）×０・８＝３３６万ドルになる。 　

   企業が中間財部門を海外に移転すれば、原材料部門は原材料を海外法人の中間財部門に輸出し、消費財部門は中間財を海外法人から輸入する。これを示したのが表の最初の４列で、４列目が各部門の税引き前の利益だ。法人税率が海外の方が安ければ、企業は海外に移転するインセンティブを持つ。例えば海外の法人税率が１０％なら、中間財生産を海外に移すことで企業全体の税引き後利益は（２００万＋１００万）×０・８＋１２０万×０・９＝３４８万ドルに増える。  　

   つまり現在の米国の法人税は多国籍企業に、法人税率の低い国に生産を移すインセンティブを与えているという意味でゆがみがあるといえる。 　国境調整を導入すると、このゆがみを是正できる。表の最後の列は国境調整の値を示す。原材料部門はすべてを輸出するので国境調整はマイナス５００万ドルに、消費財部門の仕入れは輸入なので国境調整は８００万ドルになる。この国境調整に税率２０％をかけたものが国境調整額（以下の数式の第２項）になる。中間財生産の海外移転時の税引き後利益は（２００万＋１００万）×０・８―（８００万―５００万）×０・２＋１２０万×０・９＝２８８万ドルで、国内にとどまる場合を下回る。 　
  
   国境調整が多国籍企業の海外移転を防ぐという結論は、海外移転の魅力の根元に左右されない。法人税率の低さを利用する海外移転も、賃金の安さを利用する海外移転も、国境調整があれば起きない。 　例えば中間財生産で、国内生産ならば１８０万ドル分の労働が必要だが、海外生産ならば労働投入が１３０万ドルで済む場合を考える。ここでは簡単化のために、すべて中間財部門の利益を押し上げると仮定する。中間財部門の利益は表の場合よりも５０万ドル増えて１７０万ドルになる。 　
  
   国境調整がない場合、海外の法人税率が国内と一緒だったとしても、生産費が低い地域に中間財生産を移すことで全体の利益を増やせるので、企業は海外移転を決める。 　

   しかし国境調整があると、税引き後の利益は（２００万＋１００万）×０・８―（８００万―５００万）×０・２＋１７０万×０・８＝３１６万ドルにしかならない。国内にとどまる場合の税引き後利益（３３６万ドル）より低くなるので、企業は海外移転しない。   

   こうした一見効率的にみえる海外移転も妨げられてしまうのは、海外の法人税の制度が源泉地主義をとっているからだ。もし海外の法人税も仕向け地主義に変更され国境調整が行われるなら、中間財部門の売上高はすべて輸出で、仕入れはすべて輸入なので、その税引き後所得は１７０万×０・８―（５００万―８００万）×０・２＝１９６万ドルとなり、企業全体の税引き後所得は３７６万ドルになる。 　

   つまり法人税を仕向け地主義に変えると、海外の政府にもまた仕向け地主義に変更するインセンティブが生じる。米国で法人税の仕向け地主義への変更を主張する論者は、他国が付加価値税を課して国境調整を行っているのに、米国の法人税には国境調整がないので、米国が国際競争上不利になっていると指摘する。 　

   国境調整税の本質は貿易政策ではない。源泉地主義課税から仕向け地主義課税への移行という世界的な流れの中で、米国の国際競争力を保とうとする税制改革の一部だ。 　

   医療保険制度改革法（オバマケア）代替法案を撤回せざるを得なかったことに象徴されるように、トランプ政権の政策実行能力は大いに疑問視される。国境調整が導入されるか否かも確かではない。しかし仕向け地主義への世界的な方向性が変わらない限り、国境調整などの法人税の改革は繰り返し議題にのぼるだろう。日本には消費税という仕向け地主義の税が既に存在するが、法人税の国境調整はない。米国が国境調整を導入するとき、日本の税制度は現状のままでよいのか、今のうちに見直しておくべきだろう。

(2017年3月30日付『日本経済新聞』「経済教室」より転載）