The Tax Justice Network dishes dirt on what the “financial services” industry of Cyprus was selling. So will the EU really close this business down in Cyprus? And will it roll on from that to the many other tax havens (or what the TJN people call “secrecy jurisdictions”) either in the EU or under the protection of various EU states? It could, in the end, go that way.
We can hope that this is a step on the road to bringing the financial sector under control. Continue reading
Many westerners have scolded me when I’ve told stories of the obscene amounts of music, movies and software I have pirated. What they fail to understand is that I used this mode of distribution for the lack of any realistic access to an alternative.
– Bozhan Chipev, “Piracy was my shot at equality“
A few weeks back I linked to this Guardian piece, upbeat about the OECD’s sudden interest in reducing, rather than abetting, corporate tax avoidance. I posted that because it was a nice surprise, coming from the OECD; on the assumption that the OECD acts according to the wishes of its member governments, it seemed to be an indication that, perhaps, the erosion of national tax bases had gone far enough to bring on a serious reconsideration of the ludicrous and growing tax gift that we have all been giving to multinational corporations.
Now Bloomberg has to go and spoil cast doubt on that. They detail the revolving door between the top levels of the OECD’s tax unit and the accounting and legal firms that help corporations minimize their tax payments. And they conclude by noting that the latest OECD tax chief – the new broom Continue reading
“Gold Open Access” – where authors pay to have their papers published, and made freely available on line – is one response to the well documented predatory practices of commercial journal publishers (for discussion of the latter problem, mostly as regards economics journals, see Ted Bergstrom’s website.)
On-line publishing, though, has low entry costs – especially if you don’t do any real peer review, editing, or archiving – and the combination of on-line publishing and gold open access has produced new “publishers”, often with unfeasibly large suites of new journals that look very much alike, and torrents of spam-ish “calls for papers” in academic email inboxes. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, publishes a list of “Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers” Continue reading
The growth is reported by Climate Progress, picking up a report from the San Antonio Business Journal, whose reporter consulted the actual report by Environmental Entrepreneurs. This happens despite continuing (rising!), huge, subsidies for fossil fuel use and production, and for energy gobbling urban sprawl. Dare we imagine what clean energy growth might be if those subsidies were yanked, and a revenue-neutral (offset by payroll tax reductions, perhaps) carbon tax put in place?
Glynn Moody has the story. Let it not be said that intellectual property rights are not respected in China – they seem to be playing the game just as written!
A nice account from Mondragon (by Giles Tremlett in the Guardian) of how employee ownership can help reduce the impact of recession depression.
(Cross-posted on Open Democracy.)
John Lewis’s outsourced cleaners are striking for a living wage. Recent developments are covered by Liberal Conspiracy and London Progressive Journal. The dispute has been going on for a while: here’s Polly Toynbee in the Guardian last September.
You might be inclined to file this under obvious – where in the world are cleaners not outsourced and underpaid? With John Lewis, though, it points to an important general problem with the viability of employee ownership of businesses (for readers not in Britain, the John Lewis Partnership is owned by its 81,000 employees; it is a successful operator of department stores and supermarkets.)
John Lewis employees at the annual bonus announcement
Since the 1950s, economists have speculated that a profitable employee-owned business would not grow as much as the same business would if it were owned by capitalists, because the incumbent workers would not want to dilute their individual shares of profits by adding new worker-owners. Continue reading
Robert Waldmann has a pretty good account.
Waldmann is an American economist who works in Rome. For readers less familiar with current American political discourse, his use of the terms “serious people” and “serious right thinking people”, and his description of Monti as “the very eminent Eurocrat economist extremely serious person”, should be understood as they would be when used, in the USA, to mock “very serious people” who treat only the conservative Washington, D.C. consensus as important.
“OECD calls for crackdown on tax avoidance by multinationals” says the Guardian. The report Addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting outlines the problems national governments now have taxing big corporations as they move profits around the world in a shell game. Angel Gurria, the OECD’s head, is not overselling it when he says “democracy is at stake”: the legitimacy of democratic states is being undermined as they allow both large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid taxation, shifting the burden to taxpayers of lesser means and the users of public services. And it is refreshing to see the OECD out front on this: it has no authority, but as the leading think tank of the rich industrial democracies it can help shape the consensus and provide a focal point for action. Richard Murphy – an authoritative source these matters, and long a trenchant critic of the OECD’s half measures – is pleased by the report.
What is really funny is the line “The OECD said many countries had failed to update their tax rules to cope with the digital age.” Continue reading
Frederick Guy 