THE NEXUS BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL TAX COMPETITIVENESS AND THE SHADOW ECONOMY: A CROSS-COUNTRIES ANALYSIS

. The article is devoted to the study of the essence and peculiarities of the growth of tax competitiveness of the country in the conditions of a significant amount of shadowing of incomes and legalization of illegally obtained funds. The object of the study is the levels of shadow economy and tax competitiveness of the country. In the paper the 5,348 particular: bringing the domestic regulatory framework to the requirements of the international community, reducing corruption, reducing time spent on filing and filing tax reports, optimizing the tax burden. Conclusions. The results of the study form the basis for the development of new and improvement of existing recommendations for the prevention of the use of shadow schemes of with drawal and their further legalization in Ukraine in terms of the tax channel of shadowing the

Introduction. Peculiarities of economic development of a large number of countries with medium and low levels of development are budget deficits, constant capital outflows, high levels of labor migration and soon. The precondition for these processes is the low efficiency of certain components of public policy, the reform of which does not ensure the formation of sustainable competitive advantages of economies over other economies, and leads to the outflow of highly skilled workers, relocation of tax bases in countries with more favorable tax conditions in terms of starting and running a business, investing money.
Ukraine's constantly growing need for financial resources highlights the need to find additional and monitor existing sources of filling the state budget, attract financial resources by in creasing the country's investment attractiveness, registration and business in Ukraine by nonresidents and more. One of the indicators that characterizes the country's attractiveness to international investors and business partners, the favorableness of its business environment is the level of tax competitiveness. The understanding of the governments of most countries of the world of the importance of this indicator in the implementation of international economic and investment policy necessitates the government to intensify its efforts to form a competitive advantage in the process of implementing its tax policy.
Literature review and the problem statement. Today, the definition of «tax competitiveness of the country» is characterized by in consistentapproachestoitsunderstanding, lowlevelofresearchand a wide variety of interpretations. C. Tibou [10] in his research considers the concept of tax competitiveness of local governments, which means the process of reducing the level of local government tax burden in their territories. According to the author, this concept should be equated with the tax autonomy of local governments. A sufficient level of tax autonomy allows local governments to compete for the right to register business in their territory by manipulating the size of tax rates and fees, the introduction of preferential tax regimes, exemption from taxation of certain tax bases.
D. Bradfordand W. Oates [2] emphasized that along with the economic benefits, these manifestations of tax competition have a number of negative consequences for the economy. According to the authors, one of the main threats to the implementation of the semeasures by public authorities, in the framework of increasing tax competitiveness, is to reduce the state's ability to provide the population with a sufficient level of public goods.
A. Boyko and J. Samusevych [1], I. Tiutiunyk, O. Mazurenko [6] considered tax competition as a prerequisite for economic growth and de-shadowing of the economy. Taxcompetitive jurisdictions receive significantly greater economic benefits due to more favorable conditions for business registration and profit in their territory compared to competitors. Ultimately, this leads to a significant increase in the level of tax burden in other jurisdictions and an even greater evasion of taxes by economic entities [7].
Thus, the lack of a common understanding of the nature and role of tax competitiveness in the economic development of the country highlights the need for more detailed study of the content of this concept and its relationship with the shadow economy.
The purpose of this research is to estimate the nexus between tax competition and shadow economy.
Research  According to the WoS and Scopus databases, the vast majority of publications on tax competitiveness are published in high-ranking journals in the first and second quarters ( Table 1). The largest number of works (217 for the WoS database and 176 for the Scopus database) was published in International Tax and Public Finance journal. OSviewer t ories (Fig. 2) ompetitiven owed us to me time, the ues of tax also much third and 1 According to the results of the analysis, a very close relationship between tax competitiveness is observed with the concept of shadowing of the economy. In order to confirm the hypothesis of the existence of this relationship, we will analyze the relationship between these indicators using the Ordinary Least Squares method. The results of the cross-country analysis are shown in Table 3. The results of the Ordinary Least Squares test confirmed a statistically significant nexus between tax competition and shadow economy. Thus, the de-shadowing of the economy can be considered as an effective tool to increase the level of tax competitiveness of the country.
Today, among the whole set of tools to increase the level of tax competitiveness of the country, the use of incentive tax benefits is widely used [14; 15]. Most often, these tools are used by: 1) countries with economies in transition, which have not yet completed the transition from a socialist to a market tax system and which use these incentives as an alternative to other mechanisms to withdraw funds from the shadows; 2) in developing countries, these incentives are aimed at neutralizing other short comings (low level of infrastructural development, out dated regulatory frame work, high level of bureaucracy, etc.), which stimulate economic entities to shadow activities (Fig. 3). At the same time, tax incentives themselves can not serve as a catalyst for shadow activities, as the general features of the tax system (tax base, tax rates, etc.) are more important for participants in shadow operations [7; 11].
Countries with economies in transition are quite attractive for shadow with drawals. A number of their legislative provisions still correspond to the conditions of the socialist economy and do not fully correlate with the conditions of taxation of market economies.
This leads to a gap between the tax bases, which must be accrued in accordance with the standards of a market economy and actually accrued in these countries, and thus reduce the level of tax competitiveness of the country.
At the same time, the lack of a coherent and stable regulatory framework is a stimulus for the growth of shadow activities and reduce the level of tax competitiveness of the country. The main feature of the tax legislation of many developing countries and countries with economies in transition is its constant revision and amendment. This increases the risk of shadow activity in the implementation of capital-intensive projects and complicates the procedures for monitoring and controlling the movement of resources.
Despite the additional difficulties for government regulators in incurring additional costs for both the government (planning and forecasting tax revenues) and taxpayers, growing uncertainty about future tax results, their existence intensifies the flow of investment to the country to obtain additional benefits.
Thus, the reduction of shadow operations is possible due to increased control over economic entities. Given the important role of tax payments in the economic development of the country, one of the components of the roadmap for de-shadowing the economy is forecasting the amount of tax evasion from changes in the level of macroeconomic stability in the country.
The basis of this process should be the introduction of tools for estimating and forecasting the amount of tax arrears received by the budget due to the implementation of shadow schemes of tax evasion. The consequences of these actions, as a rule, have a destructive effect on the country's economic development, which is growing every year (including due to the cumulative and synergistic effect). Fig. 4 shows the dynamics of changes in tax evasion (TI) as the difference between the total amount of uncollected tax payments and the amount of losses due to tax benefits, tax exemptions, errors and miscalculations of tax payments. Forecasting the amount of tax losses through the use of shadow schemes can be done using a continuous function, which has the following form: where � -the amount of tax losses due to the use of shadow schemes in the period t, %; � -the amount of tax losses due to the use of shadow schemes in the base period, %; ∝ -a function that reflects the impact of tax losses on the level of tax competitiveness of the country.
The α function takes into account the threats and benefits of using shadow schemes to conceal income. At the same time, according to the results of the analysis of the threat of shadowing of incomes, they are usually long-term, and the refore in the evaluation process should take into account their future value. The benefits of income shadowing due to value added in the economy by increasing employment (even in the shadow economy), GDP growth through the sale of shadow products (in the official and shadow markets) are more valuable now than in the future.
Thus, the established patterns can form the basis for determining the projected values of budget losses from the use of shadow operations and will serve as a basis for implementing the road map for de-shadowing the economy in the context of improving macroeconomic stability.
The generalization of the analyzed measures of de-shadowing of the economy carried out in Table 4 forms the basis for the formation of a road map of de-shadowing of the economy. Their implementation will increase the level of publicity and transparency in the work of state bodies, financial monitoring and control bodies, reduce bureaucracy and corruption in the country, simplify financial monitoring and control over tax administration processes, increase the stability of the national economy by removing some illegally obtained income and, ultimately, an increase in the country's level of tax competitiveness.  Conclusions. The results of the study form the basis for the development of new and improvement of existing recommendations for the prevention of the use of shadow schemes of with drawal and their further legalization in Ukraine in terms of the tax channel of shadowing the economy.
The priority measures should be: increasing the efficiency of tax and customs services by conducting impartial inspections, reducing corruption in government agencies; organization and systematization of the relationship between individual agencies by establishing cooperation between individual entities of the financial sector and government institutions; development of the system of international cooperation in the direction of prevention of participation of domestic economic entities in transnational schemes of concealment of incomes and their removal to the territory of other states; improving the procedure for calculating and paying taxes, reducing the time spent on filling out and maintaining tax reporting; strengthening the responsibility for tax evasion, including increasing the amount of material and the introduction of criminalliability for the shadowing of income in particularly large amounts in the event of damage to the state in particularly large amounts; to introduce electronic cashflow monitoring services (including through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning), development of a methodology for identifying risky financial transactions, improving the tools for implementing the tax system, etc. Improving the tax system can be seen as a guarantee of economic growth and development of the country, stimulating the development of certain sectors of the economy, bringing out of the shadows a significant amount of financial flows. Such measures include a review of individual vectors of taxpolicy, rates and objects of taxation, types and amounts of tax benefits, etc.