The Spanish newspaper LibreMercado.com published an article from IREF’s fellow Angel Martin, with reference to our Yearbook on European Taxation 2011. You can read the paper here.
Europe
This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
In the past year, Brussels has revealed its near-obsession with fiscal convergence in Europe. As the euro zone’s debt crises roil financial markets, the EU’s leaders have made clear that the only path they see to survival is centralized budgetary oversight and harmonized tax policy.
The European Commission has recently relaunched the proposal for a common system for calculating the tax base of businesses operating in the EU. According to the officials, the aim is to significantly reduce the administrative burden, compliance costs and legal uncertainties that businesses in the EU currently face in having to comply with up to 27 different national systems for determining their taxable profits.
You can find here a selection of reports and papers on taxation in the EU and in European member States.
While a resolution of the debt crisis currently facing the eurozone would be most welcome, it is not clear that the current discussion goes much beyond how to bailout member countries, and whether it should be the taxpayers of these countries, the German and French taxpayer or the holders of the debts of these countries, mainly German and French banks. Even if it is decided which solution to take, the underlying problem that caused the crisis in the first place remains. This is the one-size-fits-all eurozone monetary policy.
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 annual report of the World Bank is announcing a record level of the number of business regulation reforms in the world. Between June 2008 and May 2009, 287 reforms were recorded in 131 economies, 20% more than the year before.The good news are that “reformers focused on making it easier to start and operate a business, strengthening property rights and improving the efficiency of commercial dispute resolution and bankruptcy procedures”, as one can read in the report. Eastern Europe was one of the more active regions. Here is the ranking of the 27 European countries:
Super Size It? A Rationale Against Feeding the Leviathan – Julia Toser
The threat of fiscal harmonization – Massimiliano Trovato
What is the current state of public finance in the EU countries? How did the various governments reacted to the crisis which developed in the second half of 2008? To what extent did it trigger a change in tax policy? IREF has asked scholars and experts from fifteen different EU countries to present and evaluate the 2008 tax policies of their respective countries.
Introduction by Pierre Garello, Director of the Research Department of IREF
We already knew what the general situation and trends are in the EU. Namely, that the EU- 27 is still the region of the world with the highest fiscal burden, that situations differ greatly among EU member states (with new member countries having lower fiscal burden) and that some trends can be found in the evolution of the tax-mix with, for instance, a weak tendency to replace corporate income tax and labour tax with consumption tax. The reports presented here give life to those statistics. They reveal what were the priorities and constraints of the government in each country?