IREF

This is the question addressed by Jason Fichtner and Katelyn Christ in their working paper for the Mercatus Center. They explain that a real tax reform is necessary, rather than…

Philipp Bagus, a young Spanish scholar and one of the prize winners of the IREF Essay Contest, recently published a very interesting book on the European monetary system. Using the…

If we are smart enough to avoid armed conflicts, protectionism and the like, there are good reasons to believe that it will be a nice year for all of us,…

In Slovakia, the economic growth has been one of the strongest in the EU over the period 2004-2008 and it came with soaring tax revenues. This growth itself was the by-product of several important reforms, especially the tax reform. It was based on real investments, not on speculation on real estate markets or inflated construction sector. After the 2008 crisis, the relatively low Slovak debt of 35.4% GDP does not attract as much attention as countries around the Mediterranean Sea or Ireland.

This is the cumulated budget deficit of the OECD countries in 2010. On average, it represents 7.5 GDP points.

No, this is not a joke, but one of the suggestions of the very serious and very official report that the French President Sarkozy commissioned to the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Indeed, according to the figures presented by the headed by Stiglitz Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, the traditional disposable income measure, which estimates income per capita in France to be only 66% of income in the US, is inadequate.

While some states, departments and cantons around the world are struggling for more fiscal autonomy, the Scottish government is hesitating to grasp at the opportunity offered by the UK government. The proposal of the new Scotland bill is to allow the Scottish government to increase or cut income tax rates by up to 50% for basic rate taxpayers, and by 20% at the highest rate. In exchange, the central government in Westminster plans to cut a part of its transfers to Scotland. It makes sense, since “autonomy” usually goes with “responsibility”.

It is a common statement today that in our modern societies we care too much about growth and need another intellectual framework that can guide policies and populations to more worthwhile values and sustainability. Johan Norberg is critically examining some of the alternatives to the traditional development indicator, the Gross Domestic Product growth.

Like in most European economies, public debt in Germany is characterized by a secular upward trend. There are reasons to believe that the current trend is not sustainable. The ratio of debt to GDP is expected to reach 76,5 percent this year (Deutsche Bundesbank 2010), which implies a ratio that is more than doubled since 1980. Looking at the time-series since the mid-1970s (e.g. Sachverständigenrat 2009, p. 373), one can infer that the responsibility for this long-term increase falls both to the federal and state governments, with the impact of the former being about three times as large as the impact of the latter. One can also infer that, after the Keynesian fiscal policy experiments in the 1970s, the debt-to-GDP ratio stagnated for much of the 1980s, and increased again in the early 1990s following the German re-unification. Following periods of stagnation are then punctuated by the end of the internet bubble at the beginning of the last decade, and by the recession following the most recent financial crisis.

In the context of debt crisis in the European Union, the French public debt finally attracts the attention of the government. Is the situation still under control and is there…