Publications

“A recession can be a good time to grow a business”. Thus is the opinion of Lord Young, a British cabinet minister under late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and still having his own office in Downing Street. Lord Young’s comments are stated in a report to be published this week and addressed to Prime Minister David Cameron. It is obvious that Lord Young stands for a “creative destruction” and is actually stating an economic truth. But truth is not always welcomed by unions and especially by the Trades Union Congress.

The Friedman Foundation has published a report about the 22 American States that enforce school choice thanks to vouchers. Children’s work is better, teaching’s quality has improved and the overall cost of the school system is cheaper which is a benefit to low-income families.

The European Commission’s forecasts are gloomy: a 0.1% decrease of European GDP in 2013 as a 0.4% decrease for the Eurozone. It seems that, one after the other, all the member states are collapsing and get trapped into economical disarray. The European Commission gives more time for France and Netherlands to reduce their deficits, but Slovenia is on the edge of explosion while Cyprus, Spain and Italy are very far from recovering. Europe has become the “Sick Man of the World”.

Germany and Finance Minister Wolfgand Schäuble do not press for setting up a banking union and rejects a centralized authority whereas France and Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici are urging to set up the banking union through centralization. The latter position is also the Commission’s. The Eurozone financial convergence will prove to be complex: European negotiations are at a crossroad not knowing which paths to take yet.

WP 2013-03. Executive Summary International restructurings by globally acting enterprises have become a common occurrence in the wake of accelerating globalization and have led to increasing global relocations of economic…

These figures, calculated by the IREF, point out what is happening in the United Kingdom governed by Premier David Cameron. Since the Tories arrived in power in 2010, between 500.000…

Big Governments usually do not trust people or companies to improve living conditions. That is why notions of “social justice”, “solidarity”, “equality” and above all “sharing” were hijacked by Governments and turned into an economic principle: redistribution. Since it is believed the Government is the only organization that can be fair and would share wealth without any interests of its own, collectivism has been on the top of political agendas. Reality and practice have blown up this utopian belief: Governments are acting for their own interest, the one of the public sector, hampering the private sector’s growth. Yet “sharing” does not need any Government to be implemented: citizens can do it on their own and be even more generous than Governments could imagine. A recent study done by Sinan Aral, an assistant professor and a Microsoft Faculty fellow at NYU’s Stern School of Business, leads us to believe that economic “sharing” and distribution of “wealth” do not need any Government to be fair. People can be trusted!

Knowledge has now become a capital investment and no longer a cost of producing goods. This change has been announced by Brent Moulton, head of national accounts at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), on April 22nd, 2013. This will change the way gross domestic products are calculated. It will lead to an immediate 3% growth in the United States’ GDP.

The new IREF paper of Stefan Lutz, from the University of Manchester, UK, and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, points out that if it is apparent that companies do not welcome taxation, the main reason is that taxes reduce profits: shareholders are disappointed and the prospects for investments and development are penalized. This paper, however, concentrates on how companies react to taxation by changing their “gearing ratio”, i.e. the compositions of the financial resources at their disposal by investigating a panel of 240,000 European firms during the 1985-2010 period.

Richard Durana, Ph.D, director of Institute of Economic and Social Studies (INESS) has annouced that INESS released the Receipt for Government Services for 2013.
The annual price of the state for Slovakia increased by EUR 322 (7.3%) and reached EUR 4,704 per citizen.