IREF

According to Eurostat, the public expenditure in Romania in 2009 was 40.4% of the Gross Domestic Product. This means nothing else but the fact that 40.4% of the wealth was spent by someone else, not by the people who actually produced it. On average, they could dispose only 59.6% of the results generated by their efforts. This implies that romanians worked 147 days for the state. Consequently, 28th of May is the Tax Freedom Day for the Romanian taxpayers.

After weeks of internal discussions, the French government is unveiling its proposals to reform the pension system. One of the key measures is to push back the legal age of…

The French ministers decided not to follow the example of their Spanish colleagues and keep their salary at the current level (about 14 000 €). They considered that to cut…

This is a statement of the former minister of finances Thierry Breton. According to him, in 2013 France will exceed the amount of bonds emitted by Germany. The debt in the euro zone will become therefore mostly “latin”, with France, Italy, Spain and Portugal becoming the main debtor nations. They have, adds Thierry Breton, built their national (cheap) debt on the solidity of the German bonds but this era is coming to an end. Nowadays, the totality of the income tax revenues in France is going to the payment of the interest of the public debt.

As voices are heard everyday to “regulate” and “discipline” the finance industry, Lawrence H. White, Professor at George Mason University, Virginia and top scholar in money and banking, bring to our attention this very relevant quote from William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), Yale Professor, historian and sociologist.

IREF is presenting for the third consecutive year a unique report on taxation in Europe. You can find here expert analysis of the fiscal policy in 22 european countries, the most recent data and forecast for future developments. Summary by Professor Pierre Garello.

The disaster everyone feared for several months finally occurred yesterday – Greece’s credit rating was reduced to junk status and financial markets slumped. Moreover, Portugal’s debt has also been downgraded, Spanish stocks plunged more than four percentage points and in Italy it was difficult to sell government bonds.

The last statistics from the OECD are unequivocal: the unemployment rate in France is and has always been well above the average for the OECD countries and also above the average of countries from the euro zone. This is a proof that the State is not the solution for unemployment.

This is the name of the paper from Bruce Yandle that you can read in the last issue of Cato’s Regulation. In the surrounding flood of new taxes, Bruce Yandle is addressing the question of whether the intention behind them is to correct “market failures” as pollution, obesity, financial speculations and so on, or to simply raise revenue for a deficit-plagued government.

Last week, Eurostat published the statistics on GDP growth for 2009 and it is without surprise that we read in the data a slowing down of economic growth for OECD countries. The average decrease in GDP points for EU countries is -4.2%. But this average is hiding some astonishing disparities.