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…
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…