European Union

The European economy is under threat. But it is not by producing another treaty that it will be saved. In order to restore the trust required to produce economic progress, the states first must enforce the existing treaties, in particular the Maastricht rules on a 3 per cent deficit and a debt of 60 per cent of GDP. If you support this position, please send us a message by clicking on contact@irefeurope.org

It is often rightly pointed out that the EU has (so far) no power to tax. True. But it has the power to regulate and uses it! If both, taxation and regulation have a profound impact on companies’ and, if only indirectly, on consumers’ decisions, taxation attracts more public attention largely because data on taxation are more readily available. As a consequence, the impact of EU and member states regulations on our economies tends to be underestimated. How can we correct for this? A look at the work done in the US by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, will provide some inspiration.

While several EU member states are facing an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis and others are struggling to cut their spending to avoid the crash, the EU Budget and Financial Programming…

The disaster everyone feared for several months finally occurred yesterday – Greece’s credit rating was reduced to junk status and financial markets slumped. Moreover, Portugal’s debt has also been downgraded, Spanish stocks plunged more than four percentage points and in Italy it was difficult to sell government bonds.

Last week, Eurostat published the statistics on GDP growth for 2009 and it is without surprise that we read in the data a slowing down of economic growth for OECD countries. The average decrease in GDP points for EU countries is -4.2%. But this average is hiding some astonishing disparities.