„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…
In a press release published today, the European Commission set out its ideas for the future taxation of the financial sector. Underlining that the financial sector needs to make a fair contribution to public finances, and that governments urgently need new sources of revenue, the Commission puts forward a two pronged approach. At global level, the Commission supports the idea of a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT), which is supposed to help fund development and climate change. At EU level, the Commission recommends a Financial Activities Tax (FAT).
Politicians and interest groups in the USA claim higher taxes are necessary because it would be impossible to cut spending by enough to get rid of red ink. This Center for Freedom and Prosperity video shows that these assertions are nonsense. The budget can be balanced very quickly by simply limiting the annual growth of federal spending.
Portugal has a long tradition of corporate tax evasion. Perception of high tax burden, social tolerance to fraud and evasion, high psychological fiscal pressure* , instability and insecurity of the tax codes and complex and slow fiscal system are the factors usually pointed as the ultimate causes for this phenomenon.
Singapore will host tomorrow the Global Tax Forum 2010. According to Dan Mitchell from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, the OECD will attempt there to promote a project against tax competition. This project received a boost when the Obama Administration joined forces with countries such as France and Germany, but the tide is now turning against high-tax nations – particularly as more people understand that such an approach inevitably leads to Greek-style fiscal collapse.
2009/2010 has been a period of phoney fiscalism in the United Kingdom. The period is sandwiched between the economic crisis, which put fiscal policy onto an emergency, macro-economic footing and an election (May 6th 2010). Economic crisis has been marked in the UK as in most other countries by a severe worsening of the fiscal balance which has been supported for now by government borrowing and straightforward money-creation (“quantitative easing”). The political constraint of election has led to a more than usually cosmetic approach to changes in the structure of taxation.
This is the number of US government regulatory agencies for financial services before the 2008 crisis, according to Prof. Laurence Kotlikoff’s most recent book, Jimmy Stewart is Dead. Obviously, the…
This is the estimation of lost output for every dollar of government spending that made the University of Chicago’s professor Harald Uhlig in a paper published by the American Economic…