Taxes

In 2006 a major change was implemented in France regarding the income tax. Not only the top marginal rate was lowered (from 48.09% to 40.00%), but the same treatment was…

This is the question addressed by Jason Fichtner and Katelyn Christ in their working paper for the Mercatus Center. They explain that a real tax reform is necessary, rather than…

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.

This report offers a survey of EU energy taxation scheme and provides some insights on the possible outcomes of current EU policy in the energy domain. The authors are reviewing…

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.

It’s not unusual to hear people criticise the fiscal competition states engage in, pretending that such practices lead to losses in tax revenues. In this matter, the expression “harmful fiscal competition”, which is notably retained by the European Union, is often used, though sometimes inappropriately. The “harmful” character of fiscal competition between states is actually rather questionable and one may seriously doubt the very existence of such a harmful character, regardless of its form and the circumstances that accompany it.

Following the last visit to Paris of the German Minister of Finances Wolfgang Schäuble, the French and German governments have decided to harmonize their tax systems. Both sides have emphasised the positive impact that such a harmonization could have on the economic growth in Europe and on the health of the euro.

For getting out of the public finance crisis it is a good thing to cut on spending. To reform the public sector is even better. But is it also necessary to increase taxes? With few others, Jean Philippe Delsol, administrator of IREF, had developed the conviction from past experience that one should instead decrease the tax burden.

Question: Mr. President announces that, starting in 2011, there will be a sharp increase in tax rates. What do you think individuals and businesses will do in 2010? Using basic economics, Arthur Laffer in a Wall Street Journal article dated June 6 gives us a very plausible scenario: Individuals and businesses will do their best to transform the wealth and income to be taxed in 2011 into wealth and income to be taxed in 2010.