Austerity
Miles to go before the Euro Crisis is resolved!
This appeared as a Comment piece in the Observer (Guardian) on 11th December
EU leaders promised to stop Europe’s spiral into economic oblivion. They needed to immediately restore confidence in the solvency of Spain and Italy, urgently take steps to kick start growth and credibly commit to changes addressing the institutional weaknesses of the Euro area. They failed on all three fronts and are now almost out of time.
Given the inability of EU leaders to tackle the problems of Greece, a small economy, investors have been losing faith in their ability to support the much larger economies of Spain and Italy that faced economic problems. This has driven up the borrowing costs to unsustainable levels. Unless policy makers can demonstrate how troubled EU economies could meet their borrowing needs at non-penal interest rates, the crisis would continue to deepen.
Tackling Tax Flight in the European Union
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The EU, in common with other major economies of the world, loses a significant amount of potential tax revenue every year to tax evasion and tax avoidance. Some EU-wide estimates are as high as 500 billion – 1,000 billion Euros annually. This tax loss takes two major forms 1) domestic and international. Domestic tax losses come about when the taxable funds are not shipped overseas but stay within the country. This form of tax loss is on the decline as the increasingly electronic nature of financial transactions and an economy that is less and less cash oriented make domestic avoidance harder.
At the same time, tax flight, the loss of tax revenues related to cross border flows of funds, has been rising rapidly.
EU do it!
''Dear Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy,
While the US has embarked on a significant overhaul of its financial system and China has been growing at a blistering pace, the EU is lagging behind both on financial reform and on kick-starting growth. We have been too busy fighting fires partly of our own making.
Meanwhile our new-found enthusiasm for austerity measures is sure to stoke even more fires and has already sparked widespread social unrest across the Union.
The EU's citizens are mature enough to understand the need for some belt-tightening, but they resent the fact that the financial sector that is responsible for our misery is getting away scot-free.
