Carlisle, PA (June 13, 2003) — The United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board have announced that Penn State Dickinson School of Law Professor William Barker has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to lecture and research in the areas of international tax law and income tax law at the University of Witwatersrand, the University of the Free State and the University of Cape Town in South Africa during the 2003-2004 academic year.

Barker is one of approximately 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad to 140 countries for the 2003-2004 academic year through the Fulbright Scholar Program. Established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the program's purpose is to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries.

A central goal of Barker's Fulbright program in South Africa is to advance the research undertaken in his article, Optimal International Taxation and Tax Competition: Overcoming the Contradictions, that was recently published in the Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business. He plans to focus on the utility of using general and specific tax preferences to attract foreign capital and enterprises to developing countries.

"My recent work explored the maze of different rules for determining the location or source of income and has suggested a rational basis for making the connection between the income and the taxing jurisdiction," explained Barker. "In that work, I have demonstrated for the first time that two opposing economic principles of efficiency, Capital Export Neutrality and Capital Import Neutrality, reassessed in the light of their purposes and my new approach to source taxation, are not incompatible but can lead to an optimal tax strategy."

The Fulbright Program, America's flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 57 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have studied, taught or done research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the U.S. They are among more than 250,000 American and foreign university students, K-12 teachers, and university faculty and professionals who have participated in one of several Fulbright exchange programs.

Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement and because they have demonstrated extraordinary leadership potential in their fields.