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The UK post office Royal Mail is at least as fervent adept to strikes as the French Poste office. The Unions chose the open clash with the managers, rather than to follow the privatization plan. It is true that the privatization of Royal Mail would compromise a lot of the “traditions” in the company. For example, in the beginning of the decade 10 000 of the 170 000 employees were missing every working day, without any valuable reason. The cost of this absenteeism was 350 mln. of pounds per year.

France’s Draft 2010 Finance Bill provides for the abolition of the Business Tax, which is perceived by local communities and currently accounts for 10% of their revenues. Called by François Mitterrand “the idiot tax”, the Business Tax is the main local tax, paid every year by nearly 2,9 mln of companies. It is based on the investment in equipment done by local firms (the basis of the tax is the rental value of a company’s tangible fixed assets) plus 1.5% tax on the value added for companies with a turnover exceeding 7.5 mln €.

Abstract: However much may set apart Hobbes and Locke, these two progenitors of our modern intellectual tradition are in full agreement on one cardinal point, namely “that civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniencies of the state of nature, which must certainly be great.” For anyone impressed with the arguments of these two and many other great thinkers, taxes must appear as more than “what we pay for civilized society”, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously put it. Taxes are what we pay for living in any kind of lasting peace and security at all.

Introduction: There is by now a huge and rapidly expanding- literature on endogenous growth’. In this literature certain ingredients ‘enter the production function’- that is contribute to the generation of…

Abstract: The Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are similar in many respects, not least with regards to the basic administrative set-up: a non-federal task-related division between state, counties and municipalities. In all three countries, counties and municipalities raise a large share of their own revenue, which is then supplemented by government grants. In addition, central government redistributes large amounts of locally collected revenue between the municipalities and the counties respectively, severely hampering local budgetary autonomy.