Taxes

After the huge increase of public deficits during the past two years, the French government is claiming the beginning of a new era and promises to limit the budget deficit to 6 GDP points in 2011 (down from 7.7% in 2010). If this 1.7 GDP points reduction of deficit is reached, it will be the first time in 50 years that such an effort to restrict public spending ends with success. But will the government reached the target this time?

To denounce others to Authorities is unfortunately a frequent behavior that responds to the basest instincts of human beings: the desire for revenge, jealousy, collaboration with the ruling power.

Less than one month after the final vote of the 2011 Tax Law, members of the French government are revealing that there are projects for several important fiscal reforms in the following months.

The Commission has requested Spain, under EU state aid rules, to abolish a 2002 provision in its corporate tax that allows Spanish companies to amortise ‘financial goodwill’ deriving from acquisitions of shareholdings in companies in third countries. The Commission also asks for the recovery of any aid granted under this provision since 21 December 2007 where concrete legal obstacles to investment could not be demonstrated.

While governments are tempted to raise taxes on capital gain in order to reduce their public deficits, the study realized by the London based Adam Smith Institute explains why the temptation should be resisted. Based on clear economic reasoning and on evidence from the US, Australia and Canada, they show that there is a Laffer curve effect at work; one that is probably stronger than in the case of personal income tax. In other words: higher capital gains tax rates are very likely to give lower tax revenues.

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.