The newly reappointed President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso asked the former EU Competition Commissar Mario Monti to draw a report and advance “options and recommendations” to re-launch the European Union internal market. Istituo Bruno Leoni, Italy, recently published a critical appraisal of the Monti report. Our Director of research, Pierre Garello, contributed to this analysis of the propositions currently in vogue in Brussels.
In 2009 Poland was the only country in the European Union (EU) with positive economic growth. This was a result of both good policy and favorable circumstances. In 2010 Poland is no longer the sole “green island” of growth in EU. Furthermore, the state of public finance is a growing risk factor for sustainable economic growth. Although there is some progress in implementation of structural reforms (as opposed to time wasted in 2005-2007), in our opinion fiscal challenges are still not addressed sufficiently.
The low fares airline Ryanair announced the closure of its only French base in Marseille from January 2011. As a consequence, 13 Marseille routes will be closed, cutting the city from important flows of tourists. The closure is following the commencement of legal proceedings against Ryanair’s Marseille base, where all of its 200 pilots and cabin crew work on Irish aircraft (i.e. Irish territory) and pay their taxes and social insurance contributions in Ireland where they receive their Irish pay.
Romanian government took recently more and more controversial measures. Many of them are officially presented as a consequence of the economic and financial global crisis. Actually, they are the consequence of ill-conceived, poorly-explained and incoherently applied fiscal reforms. We have presented elsewhere some of the problems faced by Romania during its transition (see the reports for Romania in IREF’s yearbooks on taxtion). We will here limit ourselves to problems related to current budgetary difficulties. In short, Romania’s deficit is the result of many errors on the expenditure side as well as on the revenues side of its consolidated budget. Similar errors are still made today.
The new US$600 billion round of “quantitative easing” by the Fed announced by Ben Bernanke is undoubtedly a topic to be discussed during the coming G20 meeting in Korea. Indeed, the reverse side of a cheaper dollar is a more expensive euro, Japanese yen, Chinese yuan etc. Exporters in those countries are likely to find themselves in a disadvantageous position to US firms in global markets. The Fed move is also likely to generate massive losses to the largest dollar holders such as the People’s Bank of China and the Bank of Japan.
According to a poll by TNS Sofres, 2/3 of French people confess to have had any training courses in economics at school or at the University. Only one in ten…
This is the amount of increase of the French public debt from 2008 to 2009. It represents 10 GDP points. While making a lot of noise about the 22 billion…
„We reform firmly, gradually and effectively” said Poland’s Finance Minister, refuting accusations that his government is postponing important reforms to public finances until after the next parliamentary elections, expected for 2011. And yet these reforms can be summed up in only in one way: they are poor.
The global use of modern biofuels for transport is relatively recent and underwent rapid growth since the turn of this century. However, its performances in economic, energetic and environmental terms have recently been seriously questioned. Large-scale production of this renewable energy seems to have more inconveniences than advantages. Still, huge investments went to this sector so that any policy change away from this technological path will be costly.
This report offers a survey of EU energy taxation scheme and provides some insights on the possible outcomes of current EU policy in the energy domain. The authors are reviewing…
