Reading the New Map: Infrastructure, Tax, Data
The practitioner's edge in this subject is not knowing the rate. Rates are published; anyone can read them. The edge is decomposition — taking a cross-border move apart into how much of it is chasing power, how much is chasing a tax rate, and how much is obeying a data-residency law, and refusing to let one motive masquerade as another. Companies present the tidy motive and keep the awkward one quiet. Your job is to reconstruct all three. Do it often enough and the map stops being a set of countries and becomes a set of forces.
Knowledge check
A payments company announces it will build a new data centre in a particular country, citing 'proximity to customers.' Using the decomposition discipline, what three distinct motives should you test that announcement against, and why might the stated reason be incomplete?
Show the answer
Test it against infrastructure (is the power cheap and reliable, is there fibre and water, is there room to build?), tax (does the jurisdiction offer a favourable effective rate or credits, even above the 15% floor?), and data residency (does a law require that customer or payments data be stored or processed inside the country?). 'Proximity to customers' may be genuine but is also the socially comfortable reason to state publicly; a data-residency mandate or a power deal may be doing more of the real work, and only decomposition reveals which force is load-bearing.