tax

Slovakia’s new government has finally succumbed to the Sweet Tax Temptation, as we called it in our last publication. The Ministry of Finance has published a preliminary announcement describing its intention to introduce the tax. You read that right; it is not the Ministry of Health that is in charge of the health of the population and the sustainability of health spending.

taxation

Imagine you are running a business. You have a small business or a trade, and you are doing just enough to maintain the same standard of living across challenging times. Then suddenly, without any increase in your income compared to the prices around you, the state tells you that you are already earning enough to pay more in taxes.

A new movement called degrowth is being mentioned more and more often in the media around the world. The aim of this movement is to address current environmental challenges by abandoning the ‘economic growth paradigm.’ However, life and humanity as we know it today exist only because of economic growth. We would not be dealing with the environment today without years, decades, and centuries of economic growth.

The need to consolidate public budgets is perhaps already evident, even to those political parties that have long perceived resources as limitless and freely available. Investors worldwide eagerly await opportunities to lend to debt-ridden Slovakia. Consolidation plans are beginning to emerge, the Financial Policy Institute at the Ministry of Finance has published the impact of austerity and tax measures on GDP.

Do you also feel that communication is somehow getting faster and easier for us before national election? Statuses, clickbait headlines, short Tik-Tok videos, captions on Instagram photos. If you do not condense the information into three words, do not even bother saying anything. Okay, maybe my age and nostalgia are writing this out of me and it has always been this way, just by analog means. But what I see, even without nostalgia, is the decline of electoral agendas.

Recently publicized case of a child who was not reimbursed by his health insurance company for a requested medicine illustrates the broken world of medicine. Lots of regulations  and little market is supposed to protect patients, but it often works exactly the opposite. A three-year-old boy from Slovakia suffers from Dravet syndrome, a severe form of congenital epilepsy characterized by dozens of seizures each day.

This year, the Economics Olympiad attracted once again the interest of more than 10,000 young Slovaks and helped them to gain appreciation and recognition for their knowledge and skills in the fields of economics and finance. The sixth year of the Economics Olympiad for high-school students was concluded with the finals, which took place on Thursday, 4th May 2023 at the Hotel Devín in Bratislava.