DIGITAL ECONOMY'S MAIN COMPETITIVE AND FISCAL CHALLENGES

Since 1995, when ¿Digital Economy¿ was firstly coined by Don Tapscott in its best-seller ¿The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence¿, the Digital World has moved into an infinitely vaster Universe which can now count on over 50% of the world population online, over 30% on social network and approximately a young, dynamic, $3 trillion ecosystem based on technological infrastructure, increasingly intuitive devices and interfaces, vast audience networks, a whole new medium for advertising and an unlimited supply of content. Within this scenario, it's easier to understand the extreme urgency of adapting the actual fiscal and regulatory framework to this new economy, which is not any more related to specific high-tech sector realities but concerns all industries, on a worldwide level. The thesis will define the digital economy itself and its main characteristics, alongside with its main business models, depicting a proper context and framework within which analysing the related main issues and suggesting the direction to take. The work will be focused on two main macro challenging spheres: from a corporate perspective, I'll show which are the elements that caused a broader decline in competition and the global consequences of it; while from a fiscal perspective, starting from some international taxation key principles, I'll move through the main challenges that the digital economy brings intrinsically within itself. It will be underlined how much these two different spheres and the related challenges are not only somehow connected one to the other but are also creating a vicious circle within which fiscal elusion perpetrated by multinational companies is creating a less competitive economic environment, which is bringing companies towards more efficient elusive strategies with extremely strong effects both on social and on economic welfare level. The work will try to support the empirical theories and evidences with real cases examples, such the ones offered by Amazon, Google or Facebook, to be as much understandable and practical as possible. To conclude, I'll focus on the urgency to adapt properly the fiscal and regulatory framework to the digital world, underlining how, to find fairness and effectiveness, it will be needed a 360° collaboration from all the players involved: governments, regulators, corporations and individuals.