Suchergebnisse

Fourteen years after its "technical" start on 1st January 1999 and eleven years after the entrance into force of the "full" monetary union with the physical introduction of euro coins and banknotes on 1st January 2002, the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is facing the most severe crisis of its existence. Particularly affected, the public finance stance of some member states has become quite alarming, so that, it might jeopardize the whole monetary area. In that tense context, and in parallel to the several austerity programmes undertaken by, and/or imposed on, many governments, there have been serious calls for reforming the European Union's (EU) restrictions framing the national fiscal policies. The doubts regarding the effectiveness of these supranational fiscal rules are however not new. Since they have been initially designed, the so-called Maastricht fiscal criteria have been indeed subject to a wide range of criticisms. Setting out from this premise, the present Master's Thesis investigates the construction, as well as the functioning, of the EU instrument of fiscal discipline from a political and institutional perspective. Based on an economic theoretical framework, our research, after having specified the economic concept of "fiscal discipline", provides a dynamic institutional reading of the EU legislative acts forming the fiscal constraint in force nowadays. More than just describing the provisions prescribed in these legal bases, our study carries a deeper analysis, which highlights the improvement made over the last twenty years, as well as the remaining shortcomings and inconsistencies contained within the European fiscal environment.

The traditional normative literature on fiscal federalism argues that redistributive policies should be centralized in order to avoid welfare- or tax-induced migration. However, recent evidence shows that even in a setup where the progressivity of the income tax schedule is centralized to an upper-layer government and local governments are involved in tax competition with only a tax shifter, local mobility induces income sorting. Hence, despite centralized redistributive taxation, the resulting effective tax schedule is less progressive than what is set in the tax code. We argue that upper-layer governments anticipate the impact of local income sorting and strategically adjust their statutory tax schedules. We analyze Swiss panel data and apply causal machine learning methods to identify the effects of decentralization on the statutory tax structure. We provide evidence that more decentralized cantons reduce the tax burden for lower and intermediate income classes and hence implement more redistributive statutory tax schedules. This strategic adjustment is limited by the mobility of the tax base.