Economy

The introduction of the controversial 500+ program in Poland has so far resulted in no increase in fertility rate. Noteworthy, 12% of the program budget would be sufficient to eliminate extreme child poverty. Meanwhile, 100,000 women were pushed out of the labor market.

Analysts investigating the roots of the PiS\'s dominance agree that one of the strongest pillars of its success is a massive universal child benefit scheme called “Family 500+”, providing each and every Polish family with a monthly payment of PLN 500 (ca. EUR 115) for their second and every next underage child.

On May 11, Lithuania celebrated its second National Respect for Taxpayers Day. This day became an official commemorative day in Lithuania following the adoption of a proposal from the Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI) in early 2018.

In the beginning of 2019, the governmental Institute of Financial Policy (IFP) came with the issue of tax on sugar. However, we believe that in this case once again, the tax discussion precedes the discussion about the core problem - obesity. Therefore, INESS prepared a new publication entitled \"Bitter Tax on Sugar\".

Thirty years later, public policies and political institutions of the former socialist economies do not equally support economic freedom, just as they do not observe the same level of international trade, foreign direct investment, and income.

The fate of the “mobility package” is, however, far from sealed – the final decision on it will be taken not by the current, but the next composition of the European parliament, which may turn out to be more welcoming towards competition.

Some people claim that the main reason why gold became money was that women liked it. Others claim that it is the faith that makes us use a certain good as money. By that logic, even water could become money just by virtue of us having faith in it.

Several East European countries have been flirting with various forms of a “retailer tax”. A tax similar (but not equal) to VAT, or the sales tax. Its proclaimed aim is typically to “punish” international retail chains, which have been repeatedly blamed for problems of local farmers and local food and beverages industry.

Internet governance relies on multistakeholderism – a distributed policy making model based on voluntary cooperation of key actors, usually identified as states, business and civil society, operating “in their respective roles” (WSIS 2005) through “rough consensus and running code” .

Despite the banking industry’s excellent level of cybersecurity protections for itself, the UK public, media and Parliament appear unaware of the security weaknesses in the UK’s payments architecture which has encouraged a new push button fraud trend.