Toward a coordinate framework for cultural-creative tax incentives

This doctoral thesis examines how national, bilateral, EU, and UNESCO legal frameworks
govern cross-border access to cultural-creative tax incentives. Although states retain primary fiscal authority, that authority is increasingly conditioned by a dense network of external legal commitments. The thesis advances the claim that exclusionary outcomes in cross-border cultural access arise from systemic dysfunctions conceptualised as Structural Fiscal Access Constraints (SFACs): a composite of legal, administrative, and institutional impediments that shape how cultural-creative tax incentives operate in practice.

The thesis offers both a structural diagnosis and a coordinated reform proposal. It shows that SFACs crystallise through three interdependent mechanisms: legal constraints generated by restrictive or exclusionary eligibility criteria, inconsistent definitions, and misalignment between domestic provisions and treaty-based obligations; administrative constraints sustained by opacity, discretionary interpretation, unpredictable decisions, and the absence of coordinated procedures or even access to procedures; and institutional constraints produced by the misalignment of multi-relational governance regimes, insufficient interpretive coordination, and unintegrated administrative channels. Together, these deficits create a persistent gap between normative commitments—such as cultural rights, preferential treatment, and international cultural cooperation for sustainable development—and their procedural realisation. As a result, cultural-creative operators encounter rights that are textually affirmed yet functionally inaccessible. To interrogate these dynamics, the thesis develops and applies five analytical variables—legal certainty, rights-based enforcement, conditioned sovereignty, functional integration, and mutual supportiveness—to assess both the potential and the limitations of the legal frameworks studied.

While existing reforms at national, bilateral, EU, and UNESCO levels address parts of the
problem, they operate in isolation and lack coordination. In response, the thesis develops the Cultural-Creative Tax Incentive Model (CCTIM): a soft-governance architecture designed to reduce SFACs through procedural convergence, interpretive alignment, and inter-institutional cooperation. The CCTIM does not require doctrinal harmonisation or sovereign cession. Instead, it enhances coherence by introducing shared definitions, equivalency principles, procedural safeguards, and cross-jurisdictional interpretive tools. Embedded within the normative ecosystem of the UNESCO 2005 Convention and compatible with EU proportionality, non-discrimination, free movement, and cultural rights, the Model operationalises commitments to interpretive coordination, institutional redistribution of responsibility, and infrastructure-building across legal orders.

Ultimately, the thesis advances a new legal approach to transnational cultural-fiscal
governance—one that measures the effectiveness of cultural cooperation not by the number of commitments undertaken, but by their accessibility, predictability, and enforceability across jurisdictions. It reconceptualises cultural-creative tax incentives as shared transnational legal objects whose effectiveness depends on the alignment of rights, procedures, and institutions. By embedding cultural rights and cooperation duties into the procedural architecture of fiscal measures, the thesis offers a coherent and equitable governance model capable of supporting financial relief for artists, sustaining cultural philanthropy, strengthening audiovisual production, and enabling cross-border cultural cooperation through tax incentives that function effectively across legal systems.