Taxes

Confirming the analysis found in IREF’s 2011 yearbook, the 2011 Paying Taxes report of the Price Waterhouse Coopers says that reducing rates of profit tax is the most popular tax…

On Wednesday16 March 2011 the EU Commission published a proposal to introduce a Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB). A few days earlier, on Friday 11 March, the heads of state of the Euro area almost agreed on a « Pact for the Euro » to save the common currency from financial meltdown and come to the rescue of delinquent members (an agreement that subsequently came unstitched). These two events did not appear to be linked, except in timing. But they both illustrated, each in their own way, what one could call the EU’s « Icarus Complex ».

The European Commission has recently relaunched the proposal for a common system for calculating the tax base of businesses operating in the EU. According to the officials, the aim is to significantly reduce the administrative burden, compliance costs and legal uncertainties that businesses in the EU currently face in having to comply with up to 27 different national systems for determining their taxable profits.

Last year discussions for introduction of the so-called fiscal board in Bulgaria led to a project of the “Financial Stability Pact” prepared by the Ministry of Finance and presented by Simeon Djankov (see here). The pact provides for fiscal rules which cannot be bypassed by a simple majority in parliament – probably with their enrollment in the Constitution.

The rules cover the traditional areas – deficit, debt, expenditures and revenues. The idea is good, but in this case the details are important.

As we have reported here in last year’s IREF Yearbook on taxation, the German government that has been newly elected in autumn 2009 did have plans for a comprehensive tax reform. These plans included the introduction of an income tax schedule with stepwise increasing marginal tax rates, and possibly only three rates of 10, 25 and 35 percent. There had already been some doubts last year that a majority for such an ambitious reform could be organized. And indeed, the conservative-liberal federal government was characterized by almost complete fiscal policy inertia in its first months.

In the New York Times of March 5th, economist Tyler Cowen gives his opinion on the situation prevailing in the United States – with a debt of $9 trillion (€ 6 435 billion). Citizens, he explains, are victims of a fiscal illusion and politicians know it. To get out of that vicious circle, Cowen suggests that we listen to the wisdom of Buchanan: “Professor Buchanan argued that the real choice was between a religion of budget balance and a rule of illusion.

The latest video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explains why the process of tax competition is a critical constraint on the propensity of governments to over-tax and over-spend.…

Environmental tax reforms have a history of almost two decades and were viewed as a way to the better world the “double-dividend” theory predicted. Much “political capital” has been invested in policies leading to environmental tax reforms on European and national levels from 1992 (the year of the first EU-wide energy and carbon tax proposal) till today. In this report, the authors compare shares of environmental taxes on GDP and overall tax revenues in the EU from 1995 till 2010 to identify the real impact of such efforts.

The current Socialist (PSOE) government in Spain has claimed in different occasions that the low fiscal pressure that Spain has experienced in 2008 and 2009, gives policy-makers a large leeway to raise taxes. Besides, this measure has been supported as necessary in order to maintain –or improve- the current government-run social safety net and the level of public infrastructures. Angel Martin explains why raising taxes in Spain is not a really good idea.

You can find here a selection of reports and papers on taxation in the EU and in European member States.