Documents Trannoy, Alain 6 results

"We review the literature about inequality and welfare with a particular focus on whether Europe has a special sensitivity to these matters or specific outcomes. We argue that both statements are likely to be true which raises the possibility of a causal link. Europe has relatively good results in terms of inequality and welfare in comparison with other continents and more specifically America, because these issues matter for European people. Still, research needs to be fostered in at least 5 areas that are detailed at the end of this review. A specific attention is devoted to the contribution of other social sciences and natural sciences (cognitive science) to the development of our knowledge for these fields."

"Le débat sur l'harmonisation fiscale en Europe est loin de faire consensus. Si celle-ci est préconisée par certains pour ses effets vertueux sur l'action des gouvernements, d'autres redoutent ses effets négatifs sur les décisions publiques et privées. La fiscalité des entreprises constitue la question majeure. En effet, la concurrence combinée sur les taux et sur les assiettes engendre de nombreuses distorsions et inefficacités, notamment des opportunités d'optimisation fiscale et des coûts élevés pour les entreprises de mise en conformité si elles opèrent dans plusieurs pays européens. En conséquence, les auteurs recommandent de relancer le projet d'assiette commune consolidée pour l'impôt sur les sociétés. Ils suggèrent également que l'ensemble des taxes et contributions spécifiques sur les banques contrôlées par le mécanisme de surveillance unique soient transférées au niveau européen et fusionnées en une unique taxe sur l'activité bancaire."

"The debate on tax competition lacks due attention when it comes to the provision of public goods used by firms in their production process. Indeed, firms may accept higher corporate taxation provided they enjoy good infrastructure and public services. We quantify such trade-off, i.e. the extent to which a ‘high tax, high public goods' strategy is attractive to capital as compared to a ‘low tax, low public goods' combination. We revisit and develop the popular model of tax competition introduced by Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) in a way that allows for the testing of its main prediction. The under-provision of public inputs can be tested econometrically by estimating and comparing two simple elasticities: capital with respect to the tax rate, and capital with respect to public inputs. We regress US foreign direct investment in 18 EU countries over 1994–2003 on several variables, including the corporate tax rate and the stock of public capital, used as a proxy for public input. Based on these estimations (-1.1 for the tax elasticity and +0.2 for the public input elasticity), we conclude that raising public input through an increase in the corporate tax rate reduces inward FDI, and that tax competition may indeed lead to an under-provision of public inputs. Furthermore, a ‘high' equilibrium (high taxation and high level of public input) is not attainable for a country starting from a ‘low' equilibrium unless households have a strong preference for public inputs. On the whole, the impact of tax competition may be more diverse than a mere ‘race to the bottom'."

"This paper proposes a method to quantify the contribution of inequalities of opportunities and inequalities due to differences in effort to be in good health to overall health inequality. It examines three alternative specifications of legitimate and illegitimate inequalities drawing on Roemer, Barry and Swift's considerations of circumstances and effort. The issue at stake is how to treat the correlation between circumstances and effort. Using a representative French health survey undertaken in 2006 and partly designed for this purpose, and the natural decomposition of the variance, the contribution of circumstances to inequalities in self-assessed health only differs of a few percentage points according to the approach. The same applies for the contribution of effort which represents at most 8%, while circumstances can account for up to 46%. The remaining part is due to the impact of age and sex."