According to a scientific paper just published, lockdowns in Europe and the US decreased COVID-19 mortality by a mere 0.2% on average, while the economic costs were enormous. This is…
Publications
The ECB Report on a digital euro states explicitly that a digital euro would support the role of the European Union as a sovereign entity and foster the international role…
On January 22, the Italian Parliament set out to elect the President of the Republic succeeding president Sergio Mattarella. It was an important event. Although the Italian president does not…
Today, personal data have become the resources driving much of current online activity in our global economy. Internet has torn down national borders in many aspects of our daily life.…
In recent times, the EU authority has been challenged by Romania and Poland, both of whom have asserted the primacy of their domestic laws over EU treaty law in certain…
Central banks increasingly consider combating climate change by pursuing a “green monetary policy”. The European Central Bank is also venturing into the field of climate protection. The ECB can support…
Lest our readers might consider that our seemingly disparate range of monthly topics are randomly chosen, we summarise below how our newsletters attempt to form a pattern enabling some overall analysis of ECB thinking to be deduced. We see increasing parallels between the ECB/ Eurosystem’s approach to creative accounting and masking of its debts, and the banking system’s use of financial engineering to conceal exposures in off balance sheet vehicles.
Public debt in the whole world keeps growing. As recently reported in “A Mountain of Debt: Navigating the Legacy of the Pandemic” and “The Aftermath of Debt Surges”, it is just the last “debt wave” in a long-established tendency. Yet, the rise has accelerated during the Covid-19 Pandemic: during 2020, public debt increased by 16 percentage points to 120% of GDP in the advanced economies, and by 13 percentage points to 97% of GDP globally. What are the possible ways out?
Mario Draghi’s government is about to approve an eight-billion euro tax cut – about 1.5% of the estimated 2021 tax revenues. Is this a credible a promise or just an illusion?
The restrictions that followed Covid-19 have taken a heavy toll. Last year, GDP dropped about 9%, tax revenues decreased, and government expenditure soared. As a result, the budget deficit reached around 9.5% of GDP. The 2021 figure should be about the same. Of course, public debt has also risen and is expected to reach 150% of GDP by the end of this year (see Fig. 1).
Since the 2006 reform, Germany’s federal states are free to set the tax rate concerning real estate transfers. Yet, decentralising tax power has not led to lower taxation. In fact, the opposite happened: since 2006, average tax levels for real estate have risen from 3.5% to 5.4%,: no state has ever decreased the tax rate, and except for Bavaria and Saxony, all states have increased the rate at least once.