IREF

While several EU member states are facing an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis and others are struggling to cut their spending to avoid the crash, the EU Budget and Financial Programming…

The French government is considering the possibility to force companies that have paid higher dividends to their shareholders in 2010 and have more than 50 employees to pay a €…

Confirming the analysis found in IREF’s 2011 yearbook, the 2011 Paying Taxes report of the Price Waterhouse Coopers says that reducing rates of profit tax is the most popular tax…

On Wednesday16 March 2011 the EU Commission published a proposal to introduce a Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB). A few days earlier, on Friday 11 March, the heads of state of the Euro area almost agreed on a « Pact for the Euro » to save the common currency from financial meltdown and come to the rescue of delinquent members (an agreement that subsequently came unstitched). These two events did not appear to be linked, except in timing. But they both illustrated, each in their own way, what one could call the EU’s « Icarus Complex ».

The European Commission has recently relaunched the proposal for a common system for calculating the tax base of businesses operating in the EU. According to the officials, the aim is to significantly reduce the administrative burden, compliance costs and legal uncertainties that businesses in the EU currently face in having to comply with up to 27 different national systems for determining their taxable profits.

Last year discussions for introduction of the so-called fiscal board in Bulgaria led to a project of the “Financial Stability Pact” prepared by the Ministry of Finance and presented by Simeon Djankov (see here). The pact provides for fiscal rules which cannot be bypassed by a simple majority in parliament – probably with their enrollment in the Constitution.

The rules cover the traditional areas – deficit, debt, expenditures and revenues. The idea is good, but in this case the details are important.

Because the music stopped.

As Thatcher said, “They [socialists] always run out of other people’s money”. Portugal is now a perfect study case for this golden rule, with its quadruple-crisis.

This would be the annual interest on the USA public debt in 2021, according to the estimations made by the economist Veronique de Rugy. This number is nearly triple from…

No, this is not science fiction, but recent statistics from the most respectable Eurostat. With the exception of Cyprus and Luxembourg, France is the European country with the lowest value added by the industrial sector – 12.4% of GDP in 2009. To compare, the EU27 average is 18% of GDP and the number for Greece is reaching 13.3%, while some of the EU leading economies, like Germany, are scoring up at 22.2%. It is also interesting to notice the paradox that Germany is accounting for approximately the same number of enterprises per capita as France…

When reflecting on the causes of the current economic and financial crisis, the huge upsurge in private debt is one of the most cited reasons. Some people insist on blaming the private sector for this. According to them, the sustainability of its behavior has been clearly put into question by the recent events. But, what lies behind this exorbitant private indebtedness? This article is focusing on the Spanish case, with some references to the United States.