taxation

On June 20, 2017, the Lithuanian Free Market Institute organizes an international conference titled \"Paternalist Policies and Food Regulation: Objectives and Consequences\", aimed at initiating a series of public debates on the growing trends of state paternalism.

Lithuanians seem to have gotten used to governmental promises just as to the changing seasons. The only difference is that spring is bound to come eventually, while the government fails to deliver.

Possibility to set statutory VAT rate below 15% for a wider set of different goods and services may lead to lower effective VAT rates in various Member States. Therefore, countries, which have fewer exemptions and/or reduced rates, may maintain the same principles of taxation but lower their standard VAT rate.

If a person works, strives and believes in being primarily responsible for his/her own destiny and not someone else, if that individual plans own finances, saves up and at least tries to escape from the “from pay to pay” circle - such a person is considered as the middle class or has all the potential to become it.

49% of Ukrainian SMEs said they were inspected by a government body in 2015. These inspections took up to 14 days per year for a business on average, which means that businesses spent around 2 weeks of their operation time on dealing with the officials.

Despite Brexit, we are trying to move forward and keep working on other initiatives that would help European companies to expand their businesses. In June, I organised a breakfast debate with the European Internet Forum to discuss taxation in the digital economy.

Unified tax rules can hardly contribute to trade liberalisation. A diversity of tax systems is not a roadblock for free trade. Quite the opposite, differences in tax systems might serve as a stimulus to trade. Taxes constitute a significant share of costs and a large share of the price of factors of production, labour in particular.

Although many agree that tax competition is a healthy and natural economic process that drives economies, the EC now sees tax harmonization as an essential factor for the functioning of the single market. Together with the CCCTB initiative, the ATA Directive could be seen as a first step toward this harmonisation.

In late 2015 – early 2016, when the ABCA survey was conducted, Ukrainian small and medium businesses mostly assessed business climate in the country as neutral or negative. Only 6% of the polled SMEs believed that business climate was favorable.