“Higher Tariffs Benefit Certain CEOs, But Almost Nobody Else” By Daniel Griswold, courtesy of the Mercatus Center A big reason why tariffs are so tempting to politicians is that the costs they impose on the economy are diffused. These costs are spread across millions of households and thousands of businesses, forcing them to […]
Tag: economics
UK can’t afford to live in fiscal fantasy land
“Budget or no budget, with borrowing now on the rise again fiscal realities can’t just be wished away” By Carl Emmerson, Paul Johnson and Isabel Stockton, courtesy of IFS Today was the intended date of Sajid Javid’s first Budget as Chancellor. The failure to implement a Brexit deal, and the general election campaign, […]
Without reform the EU will self-destruct
“How to Destroy the European Union” By Prince Michael of Liechtenstein, courtesy of ECAEF and GIS Once, the “European idea” helped unite a war-weary continent. Now, overbearing central authorities, suffocating bureaucracies and reams of red tape are limiting the freedom that idea once promised. Europeans are losing trust in their […]
Drug reference pricing threatens patient health, innovation
By Erik Sass, TES Editor-in-Chief Some recent proposals to lower drug prices are not just counterproductive but dangerous, according to an international panel of expert economists convened by the Competitive Enterprise Institute at the National Press Club on Tuesday, November 5, 2019. The panelists warned that “foreign reference pricing” — a practice […]
Healthy tax competition is possible and needed
“Principled Tax Competition” By Daniel Bunn and Else Aken, courtesy of IREF The structure of a country’s tax code is an important determinant of its economic performance. The Tax Foundation’s International Tax Competitiveness Index has ranked OECD countries’ tax systems for the last six years, and every year Estonia has been the number one country […]
Deja vu, all over again
By Emilio Ocampo, Board Member, Libertad y Progreso (original) Déjà vu, groundhog day, a nagging feeling that you have already experienced the present. These are expressions everybody seems to be using these days to describe the current Argentine crisis. Below is some confirmatory evidence that Yogi Berra’s most quoted aphorism is always applicable in […]
Urgent reforms needed to help Argentine entrepreneurs succeed
Courtesy of Libertad y Progreso The reality of Argentine entrepreneurs is arduous. With growing inflation, the highest taxes in the world, Kafkaesque regulations, and overflowing labor costs, it is not surprising that in Argentina only 15% of the economically active population owns a business […]
Europe will become even more polarized in downturn
The European Union was supposed to speed up the process of convergence between the continent’s high- and low-income countries, but by many measures the continent has actually become more polarized along regional, economic lines – and this trend is only going to be exacerbated […]
UK needs to keep its sugar tax to save lives
The Big Nudge, er, a sugar tax on sweetened drinks is a recent arrival in the UK, but the country needs to resist opposition to the tax in order to combat obesity and diabetes, argues Nina Renshaw in The Telegraph, noting that it […]
The EU’s Competition and Antitrust Tightrope
By Rebecca Christie and Mathew Heim, courtesy of the Bruegel Institute The European Union, the world’s largest consumer market, needs a clearer vision for how it wants to manage competition and state subsidies affecting European markets and consumers. As business becomes ever more inter-connected, […]