What are driving hybrids? Political and economic forces behind new hybrid business forms

Abstract

The need to maintain Australia as an attractive place for business requires that Australia's tax and corporate regulatory system be readily adaptive in responding to the increasing global business economy. Over the last number of years there has been the growing utilisation of new business forms around the world, known as hybrid entities. These hybrids entities often provide the corporate characteristics of a separate legal entity and limited liability for members, however adopt partnership taxation with the income and or losses being directly attributed to members.

For example fifty-one states in the United States of America have introduced Limited Liability Companies, and its Federal Government has introduced S Corporations. Other examples around the world include the Limited Liability Partnership in United Kingdom and the Loss Attributing Qualifying Company in New Zealand. Given the growing international utilisation of these new business forms and Australia's only limited recognition of them, a thorough analysis of what have been the political and economic forces influencing this emerging global trend is important. With a thorough understanding of these key drivers preliminary conclusions can be made about whether these forces are likely to be present in Australia. Such conclusions will assist in determining whether Australia should expand its current offering of business forms to include hybrids. This particularly important to consider, as it is disturbing that Australia's current tax and corporate regulatory system may be generating an incentive for investors to adopt suboptimal forms to conduct their business operations.