taxation

Romanian government took recently more and more controversial measures. Many of them are officially presented as a consequence of the economic and financial global crisis. Actually, they are the consequence of ill-conceived, poorly-explained and incoherently applied fiscal reforms. We have presented elsewhere some of the problems faced by Romania during its transition (see the reports for Romania in IREF’s yearbooks on taxtion). We will here limit ourselves to problems related to current budgetary difficulties. In short, Romania’s deficit is the result of many errors on the expenditure side as well as on the revenues side of its consolidated budget. Similar errors are still made today.

Portugal has a long tradition of corporate tax evasion. Perception of high tax burden, social tolerance to fraud and evasion, high psychological fiscal pressure* , instability and insecurity of the tax codes and complex and slow fiscal system are the factors usually pointed as the ultimate causes for this phenomenon.

2009/2010 has been a period of phoney fiscalism in the United Kingdom. The period is sandwiched between the economic crisis, which put fiscal policy onto an emergency, macro-economic footing and an election (May 6th 2010). Economic crisis has been marked in the UK as in most other countries by a severe worsening of the fiscal balance which has been supported for now by government borrowing and straightforward money-creation (“quantitative easing”). The political constraint of election has led to a more than usually cosmetic approach to changes in the structure of taxation.

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.

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.

Taxation and Justice : A classical Liberal Perspective – Petra Orogvanyiova

From taxation to Justice – Pierre Bessard

Taxation and Justice – Daniel Pellerin

Taxation and Economic Growth: Reconciling Intuition and Theory – Dalibor Rohá?

Taxation, Individual Incentives and Economic Growth – Alex Robson

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?

The model presented in the paper leads us to predict that the level of redistribution will be all the more important where the jurisdictions have been able to shelter themselves…

Abstract: The paper illustrates the evolution of the territorial system of government in Italy. A traditionally centralized state is turning into a quasifederation. The reasons underpinning this transformation are the growing insatisfaction with the inefficiency of the central government, the quest for autonomy by the fastest growing regions and the opposition by the latter to the interterritorial redistribution of resources made by the central government with the use of nontransparent and inefficient instruments.