As the FT reports this morning: Northern Ireland’s devolved government faces its biggest overhaul in 15 years as politicians and officials brace for the arrival of long-delayed public spending cuts. Those cuts are the price Northern Ireland has to pay to introduce the tax competition that its politicians wish for with the Republic of Ireland.
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Edmund Phelps was the 2006 Nobel laureate in Economics and is director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. He argues in the FT this morning that the: slowdown [in European growth] resulted from narrowing innovation. Even in the postwar years, innovation in Europe was feeble by past standards. In the 1960s, it
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As Economia magazine, and many others, have noted: The majority of the British public thinks it is unacceptable to avoid paying tax, according to a new poll by YouGov In total, 59% of the UK public thinks that tax avoidance is morally wrong, making no distinction between avoidance practices and illegal tax evasion. Only 32%
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The East Coast main line was privatised, again, yesterday. After five years in public ownership, in which it was one of only two train franchises to make a positive contribution to the UK Exchequer,  paying a total of £1 billion to the Treasury during that period, it was let to Virgin and Stagecoach. I am
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Mark Blyth is the Eastman professor of political economy at Brown University and the author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. A recent article by him relates the speech he made to German Social Democrats on being awarded a prize in Germany for that book (which I admit I have not read). This,
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As the FT notes this morning: The coalition’s ambitions to promote the UK’s £60bn pharmaceutical sector as a high-growth industry have suffered a blow after drug output dropped by a quarter during the lifetime of the government despite an expanding market at home. The is significant: the pharmaceuticals industry is supposedly one of the UK’s
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In an editorial this morning the FT says: More than two centuries after the introduction of income tax by Mr Pitt, his successors should end the egregious situation where the wealthiest enjoy the privileges of UK residency without paying their fair dues to the exchequer. The anomaly of non-dom status cannot be defended. It should
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As the Guardian has noted this morning: The UK’s fund management industry is “ripe for investigation” because of “an alarming lack of transparency that surrounds [its] pay and practices”, the influential Institute of Directors said on Sunday. Simon Walker, director general of the IoD, said “uninterested” financial regulators should wake up “to avoid another scandal
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If you want to know why the domicile rule survives despite the very obvious abuses it permits note this in an email I have just received: It survives because the tax profession and banks make money from it. And they are the people who are too close to writing too much tax law. And so this
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