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:
Europe
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?
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.
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