economy

After many years, the last year’s organization of the traditional international conference Free Market Roadshow, which has been organized by INESS in cooperation with AEC was cancelled due to the pandemic. This year, it was brought back - into the online space - and dedicated to the topic which has been perhaps the most pertinent for the last year and for many years to come: Pandemic Lessons.

The life of a liberal in Poland is not a piece of cake. Quite frankly, liberals up to this day are really the subject of political torment, given the pitiful choices they are given every election.

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.

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.

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.

The tragedy of the commons describes the opposite situation - the property belongs to everyone, but at thesame time to nobody, although they all think that a) the property belongs to nobody, and b) they have full rights to the benefits from the property.