Pas de sommaire automatique

In the new IREF working paper “Taxing Artificial Intelligences”, Julian Arndts and Kalle Kappner analyse the fiscal implications of the presence of artificial-intelligence (AI) machines in the production processes.

After the incredible Republican presidential primaries opened the path to the surprising, to say the least, Donald Trump Presidency in 2016, today the Democracy Party is involved in a quite similar situation. While three years ago there were 17 candidates at the Republican primaries (5 of them withdrew just before the primaries), now the Democratic Party has reached 25 candidates. Of course, not all of them appear to have a real chance of winning the primaries. Still, according to the latest RealClearPolitics.com survey average, there are at least seven candidates with a percentage larger than 2%. They are Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States under the Obama Presidency; the “eternal” Bernie Sanders; the surging (according to the latest polls) California Senator Kamala Harris; the Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren; the Mayor of South Bend Pete Buttigieg; the media beloved Beto O’Rourke; and, finally, the New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.

Facebook’s greatest recent challenge has been the fading of its brand. A veritable slew of newer social media platforms are cooler and more trendy than Fb, which now languishes in popular esteem as the social platform of choice for the out of touch greying generations, rather than youngsters.
Fb has 3.5 billion customers – half the world’s population. For these reasons, we think that its new currency Libra is interesting. In particular, it shines a light on continuing existential threat to the euro, which is only one of the presumably G7 currencies whose assets will back Libra. Will Libra succeed?

While all of the former socialist economies have liberalised and strengthened their markets over the past two decades, they have failed to strengthen the rule of law (see Table 1). Under socialism, legal systems are not designed to protect the rights of individuals. Instead, they serve the interests of the political elite. To that end, judges, prosecutors, and other judicial officials are trained and expected to cater to those interests. Most worrisome, some of the former socialist economies have even seen the weakening of the rule of law in the last few years.

The purpose of the state pension regime in the UK is to ensure a basic pension to those who have paid reasonable contributions (via national insurance taxation) during their work life. It is essentially a system that attempts to ensure a subsistence income after retirement. The regime is an opt-out system: workers can decide to leave the state pension regime and receive a rebate on national insurance contributions. The current rebate, however, in not enough to incentivise significant numbers of workers to leave the state pension and look for alternative pension funds. Anticipating the pension age increase not only is just a palliative solution to a systemic problem of the pension regime, but it also unfair.

By prioritising Paris commitments, while ignoring the more practical concerns of freer energy trade, the EU has put politics over economics. The current phrasing of the Renewable Energy Directive punishes states not party to Paris. Consequently, it will make trade with the United States more difficult, drive up the costs of clean energy, and make it harder for EU member states to meet their emissions targets post-2020.

In many markets, there is a common phenomenon that, for a given change in costs, prices tend to rise more quickly when costs increase than they fall when costs decrease. As evident in some recent price rises in the UK energy market, this “rockets and feathers” pricing pattern is often claimed as evidence of collusion and followed by calls for greater regulation. However, there are other more competitive explanations and so care is needed when considering a potential remedy.

The recent EU-Japan free trade agreement will bring significant economic benefits to the EU. More importantly, the Agreement also indicates a change in the EU’s stance toward globalization and trade partnerships. While relationships with historic trade partners (the US and the UK) appear to be deteriorating, the EU seems to have acquired awareness of its essential role of free-trade leader and has now started to turn its interests towards Asia.

Central Banking The European Commission accepts that EU law requires accounts to provide a “true and fair view” of assets, liabilities, financial position and profit or loss as specific indicators…

The UK labour market at the beginning of 2016 is in a rather good shape. The rate of unemployment has decreased steadily in the last two years and is now…