Suchergebnisse

Views of officials and scholars; 10 articles. Includes articles by Jacques Delors, Felipe Gonzalez, and Geoffrey Howe.

Since the early 1990s, EU countries have carried out numerous tax reforms. Disparate, however, have been influenced by similar macroeconomic situations or common imperatives. In many countries, the explicit priority is to improve the competitiveness and attractiveness of the domestic production site and restore incentives to work rather than extending redistribution and public spending. Reforms are now liberal rather than social democrat. However, despite globalisation and the risks of tax base absconding, the share of taxes and public expenditure in GDP has not been significantly reduced in any of the European countries. A first common concern is the taxation of multinational companies in an increasingly globalised world. Should taxation be applied at source or at residence? How can national autonomy be made compatible with the need for European coherence in the taxation of transnational companies? Similar problems arise in relation to the taxation of income from capital of households, the issue of dividend taxation and tax credit being the pivotal issue between the two problems. The second concern is the fight against unemployment. Many avenues have been used to make tax systems more employment-friendly: the reduction in social contributions, which are replaced by a levy on all household incomes, by value added tax or by environmental taxes; the reduction in social contributions concentrated on low-wage earners; the implementation of mechanisms close to the negative tax to reduce disincentives to work for unskilled workers. A third concern is environmental taxation: can it be used to reduce energy consumption and avoid emissions of gaseous pollutants, while at the same time providing a second dividend by reducing labour taxation? Finally, the question arises of the organisation of local taxation. Can the autonomy of local authorities be reconciled with the aim of redistribution and equality of citizens with regard to public services at national level? The article assesses the risks of tax competition and the ...

The report is organised into five sections. Section I gives an overview of African-EEC economic relations. The major proposals in the programme of completing the internal market of the EC are outlined in Section II while Section III, the core of the study, assesses the likely impact of the completion of the market on Africa. The lessons for Africa from the experience of the European market integration are presented in Section IV. Section V gives the conclusion of the study

The so-called Europe 1992 Project aims to bring about further economic co-operation in the European Economic Community (EEC), now known as the European Community (EC), by removing all the current major obstacles to intra-European trade. The Europe 1992 Project has generated a great deal of interest and anxiety, not least among the major trading nations of Asia. The author explores the economic and trade implications of the 1992 Project for these countries. (DÜI-Sen)