government

This year the Tax Freedom Day comes five days later; regrettably, government spending surpasses economic growth and Lithuanian taxpayers should work more and more just to pay taxes. To compare, Estonia celebrated on May 7, the United States on April 23, and Australia on April 13.

When Ukrainian SMEs are given a choice between two options – to obtain certain benefits for their sector from the government or to make sure that the government creates equal conditions for all enterprises – they choose the latter. This tendency manifested itself in the results of the national “Annual Business Climate Assessment” survey in Ukraine.

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.

We may recently often hear that something is a \"Putinesque measure\". However, in Hungary, the governing party Fidesz, lead by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is really using Putin’s solutions as its point of reference. Let’s see how similar Orbán’s and Putin’s methods are.

Most political systems still encourage politicians to promise people to solve the problems at hand with the same tools which created them in the first place: by more spending and more intervention. This, in turn, results in eliminating personal incentives and responsibilities.

The colloquium will consist of four topic-specific sessions, on monetary policy, entitlement policy, labour market policy, and the nanny state. Each session will start with an introductory presentation by the Lithuanian Free Market Institute and will be followed by a moderated discussion.

Ranked 16th in the annual Worldwide Index of Economic Freedom by Heritage Foundation, Lithuania surpasses Latvia, but falls behind Estonia. In fact, economic freedom in Lithuania is in a much better shape than it is in the neighboring Latvia (20th) and Poland (45th), but much weaker compared to Estonia (6th).

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.

Most economists and politicians agree that investment subsidies break market principles. However, many consider subsidies a necessary tool in the global competition for investors and as an economic growth booster. INESS analyzed the investment subsidies granted in Slovakia during the years 2002–2016.

On the one hand, Slovak unemployment rate is declining. Automotive industry and large companies find it difficult to hire enough employees. According to the recent reports, workers are brought in not only from Ukraine or Hungary, but even from Serbia.