WASHINGTON – Japan’s pending corporate tax rate cut will give the United States the highest tax on business profits in the industrialized world, and advocates of lower corporate taxes plan to take advantage of the global trend in their lobbying efforts.

The 35 percent federal corporate rate, combined with state rates that average 4.2 percent, would exceed the corporate tax rate in Tokyo next year, when it is slated to drop from 40.69 percent to 35.64 percent.

Business lobbyists and Republicans who will control the House in January say they will invoke the country’s new No. 1 tax status as they push legislation that would reduce the corporate rate and broaden the tax base.

“This is like a student that falls from a B-minus to an F and finally says, ‘Hey, I ought to start hitting the books,’ ” said Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, a senior Republican member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.

Tax experts say the world’s highest corporate rate and a policy that taxes the foreign income of U.S.-based companies combine to make the U.S., the world’s largest economy, less attractive for investment than its foreign rivals.

“It makes U.S. tax exceptionalism even more exceptional,” said Rosanne Altshuler, a tax economist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

She also noted that the U.S. is the only major nation that does not have a value-added tax.

American companies including Coca-Cola, Verizon Communications and Caterpillar have been pressing the Obama administration to push for lower tax rates on corporations.