Revisiting Taxation in the Wake of the Crisis: National or European Tax Sovereignty? Tax Competition or Tax Harmonization?
This one-day conference will be held at the Committee of the Regions. The event will consist of three panels which will address three questions: Can tax harmonization facilitate the job of Finance Ministers when coping with the need to rebalance public budgets after the stimulus packages of 2008-2009 against a background of slow growth? Can tax harmonization on mobile factors shift the tax burden from labour to capital so as to ease the creation of jobs against a backdrop of slower growth? Can tax harmonization, and tax centralization, be necessary to securing the supply of key public goods in Europe?
The conference will be divided into three panels collecting the opinions of experts, policy-makers and social partners.
The title of the first panel will be “Tackling Tax Competition to Cope with the New Pressures on Public Expenditure”. As slow growth will keep unemployment at high levels and as demographic trends will continue to show a declining path, the aim of this session will be to explore which level of EU tax coordination or harmonization will best suit the expenditure needs of the future.
The second panel will be entitled “Is tax competition harmful for employment? Using taxation to reduce labour costs”. The intention of this session is to answer the question: how can the EU reduce the competitiveness differentials stemming from diverging unit labour costs through taxation, when tax competition leads to a shift in the tax burden from mobile to immobile factors? As such, it will be necessary to assess whether tax competition in the European Union has actually improved the competitiveness of the Member States and provided an additional tool for disciplining public finance, or rather whether the competition has led to a “race to the bottom” which has worsened social inequalities in Europe.
The title of the last panel will be “From Tax Competition to Own Resources to Finance European Public Goods”. The intention of this session is to explore which new tax base can be identified to contribute to an EU budget aimed at providing key European public goods such as education, training to relocate workers from the declining sectors to the most competitive ones and infrastructures for energy interconnectivity since national budgets are currently subjected to severe constraints.