Europe

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?

After the political changes in 1989-1990 Central- and Eastern-European countries went through significant political, judicial, economic and social changes. Although the political and economic transitions have been analized intensively, not too much attention has been devoted for a long time to some basic aspects of fiscal decentralization what can fundamentally determine the performance of economic and social institutions. Recently, the OECD and the World Bank conducted researches on fiscal decentralization and tried to initiate improving local governance.