Search results

An important aspect of the impact of the economic crisis is how pay in the public sector responds – in the face not only of the evolution of pay in the private sector but also extreme pressure on public spending (of which pay is a very large proportion) as fiscal deficits soar. What are the effects on the income distribution of cutting public sector pay rates or alternative strategies to reduce the public sector pay bill? This chapter investigates these issues using data and a tax–benefit simulation model for Ireland, a country which faces a particularly severe fiscal crisis and where innovative measures have already been implemented to claw back pay from public sector workers in the guise of a ‘pension levy’, followed by a significant cut in nominal pay rates. The SWITCH (Simulating Welfare and Income Tax Changes) tax–benefit model first allows the distributional effects of these measures, which achieved a substantial reduction in the net public sector pay bill, to be teased out. The overall impact on the income distribution is assessed. This provides empirical evidence relevant to policy choices in relation to a key aspect of household income over which governments have direct influence, while at the same time illustrating methodologically how a tax–benefit model can serve as the base for such investigation.

Offshore financial centres are coming under increasing pressure from both the OECD and the European Union. They are seen by many bureaucrats and politicians in OECD countries as facilitating criminal activities such as laundering drug money as well as tax evasion and tax avoidance by residents of high‐tax welfare states. While there are good reasons for nation states to cooperate to suppress criminal activity, this is not true in relation to tax competition. The notion that by engaging in ‘harmful’ tax competition, offshore financial centres are damaging the legitimate interests of OECD nations has no sound foundation in economic theory. Competition in tax matters is beneficial and world welfare enhancing. Governments of offshore financial centres serve their own and the world's interests by providing zero or low tax environments for global business and investment and they are right to insist that treaties on criminal matters should not be used to enforce other countries' tax claims.

The purpose of this paper is to assert the link between the process of EU accession, the consolidation of democratic processes and the improvement of economic and tourism infrastructure to incoming tourism flows.

The methodology of this paper involves explanation of an analysis exploring links between governmental systems and the order necessary for economic development and tourism. The argument is supported by the recent history of tourism development in three countries, two within the EU and one outside.

Accession to the EU (especially in the case of Eastern European countries) constitutes a way to emulate the democratic freedoms and greater economic prosperity of existing EU member states. Tourism is one of the areas of economy that benefits from the stability and growth EU membership can bring. Accession to the EU has had beneficial effects for acceding in terms of political stability and tourism growth.

The opportunities that EU membership can bring to tourism development for example (also strategies to exploit these opportunities) depend to a large degree on the international relations between the EU and its rivals. The extent to which tourism demands ebb and flow is governed by a range of factors, but the issues of conflict and security are game breakers. Understanding the factors and trends involved in the peaceful resolution of conflict (democratic model) or use of force to resolve conflict (military model) is key in the analysis of future tourism opportunities.

The last 20 years have seen a significant evolution in the literature on horizontal inequity (HI) and have generated two major and “rival” methodological strands, namely, classical HI and reranking. We propose in this paper a class of ethically flexible tools that integrate these two strands. This is achieved using a measure of inequality that merges the well-known Gini coefficient and Atkinson indices, and that allows a decomposition of the total redistributive effect of taxes and transfers into a vertical equity effect and a loss of redistribution due to either classical HI or reranking. An inequality-change approach and a money-metric cost-of-inequality approach are developed. The latter approach makes aggregate classical HI decomposable across groups. As in recent work, equals are identified through a non-parametric estimation of the joint density of gross and net incomes. An illustration using Canadian data from 1981 to 1994 shows a substantial, and increasing, robust erosion of redistribution attributable both to classical HI and to reranking, but does not reveal which of reranking or classical HI is more important since this requires a judgement that is fundamentally normative in nature.

Argues that online privacy rights of consumers are not absolute rights but joint ownership privileges they share with online marketers. Consumers can voluntarily transfer these privileges to online marketers under certain mutually agreeable conditions. Accordingly, online marketers can facilitate, motivate and compensate such transfers by designing various innovative personalization strategies that, rather than jeopardize the privacy privileges of consumers, would benefit them. Technology and society can progress only through such partnerships. Cites two consistently successful net companies, Dell and eBay, as examples of such partnered personalizations.

A method of systematically assessing the “first-round” impact of tax and transfer policy changes on the income distribution and the incidence of relative income poverty is proposed. It involves the construction of a “distributionally neutral” policy, which can be approximated by a policy that indexes tax allowances, credits and bands and welfare payment rates in line with a broad measure of income growth. The impact of actual policy changes in five EU countries over the 1998–2001 period is then measured against this benchmark, using the EUROMOD tax-benefit model.