Economy

Lithuania ranks sixth in the Global Tax Competitiveness Index but it has the least attractive corporate tax regime in the Baltic region. It taxes retained and reinvested profits and applies a personal income tax when dividends are paid out. The effective combined tax rate stands at 27.7%. Estonia and Latvia tax only redistributed profits, at 20%.

After thirty years of independence, today Estonia has a very high government integrity, full respect and guarantee of property rights, a fair tax burden and government spending, high trade investment, and considerable financial freedom. Not bad for a country that has been under State Socialism for almost half a century.

The Slovak Minister of Finance claims a tax and contribution burden on self-employed people should be increased in order to be “fair“ in comparison to employees. Why can’t we put a sign of equality between these two statuses? Why doesn’t the term “fair“ make sense?

Some respected economists identified the issue of consolidation in public budget already in 2022 as a third-order problem. From an analytical point of view, he is, of course, right. A one-year deficit of 10% of GDP is nothing compared to a permanent two to five per cent deficit in the pension system with a declining workforce.

Sci-fi? Such an idea has no unrealistic basis. This biological nature of members of different cultures related to the ability to prosper is the same. One of the practical examples is the USA, which cannot refer to the race or the religion as a factor of its prosperity.

Polystyrene, wood, reinforcement steel, and other materials have not only become expensive, but their lack in warehouses indicates that the increase of prices will continue. It is similar with notebooks, bicycles, or maize.

It is the summer of the second year of the COVID-19 panemic, and the European Union has generously opened its coffers to spend on post-pandemic recovery. Various governments of the EU are scrambling to put forward their best ideas to be funded by the new support scheme.

The tax ceiling is not designed to strengthen the debt ceiling, as the latter has been devised so that the irresponsible governments in the future could not impose bring an unprecedented burden on the public finances.

The second lockdown in Lithuania is no different from the first one: there are no clear principles for economic relief, individual groups are fighting for their own interests, and the government is forced to constantly alleviate the emerging effects of the quarantine. But what if lockdowns persisted?

More than five years after its adoption, Ukraine\'s wood export moratorium was found incompatible with the Association Agreement (AA) and not justified under the GATT 1994. Ukraine\'s arguments were weak to prove that conservation of forests was the moratorium\'s primary goal.