Corporate income tax and the taxation of income from capital:Some evidence from the past reforms and the present debate on corporate income taxation in Belgium.

Any assessment of the effects of a tax reform has to be based on indicators of effective taxation. Various indicators have been developed to measure the effective taxation of income from capital. This paper briefly reviews their properties, before turning to an evaluation of the effects of the corporate income tax reform in Belgium in the nineties. Our analysis concludes that the tax reform had some success in raising more revenue in a more neutral way by repealing tax expenditures provisions so that the gap between the nominal and effective corporate tax rate narrowed. On the methodological side, our analysis concludes that there is no ideal effective tax rate: implicit tax rates based on macro-economic data and marginal and average effective tax rates are complementary indicators and should be used jointly to assess the effects of tax reforms.European Union, Tax policy, effective tax rates, implicit tax rates analysis, Corporate Taxation

What makes Personal Income Taxes progressive? The case of Belgium

In this paper we investigate the progressivity impact of various components of the Belgian personal income tax system, before and after a major reform of this system. The reform reduced the top tax rates, broadened the tax base and increased tax credits. We show that, contrary to the opinion, commonly expressed in public debates, the reform did not reduce the liability progression of the system and that the rate structure is relatively unimportant in explaining progressivity.

What Makes Personal Income Taxes Progressive? the Case of Belgium.

In this paper we investigate the progressivity impact of various components of the Belgian personal income tax system, before and after a major reform of this system. The reform reduced the top tax rates, broadened the tax base and increased tax credits. We show that, contrary to the opinion, commonly expressed in public debates, the reform did not reduce the liability progression of the system and that the rate structure is relatively unimportant in explaining progressivity.

MESC (Marginal Effective Statutory Charge), an extension of King-Fullerton methodology

The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand it aims at extending King-Fullerton methodology to a larger scope of liabilities and primarily, in the empirical section of the paper, to statutory charges associated to labour costs, basically employers' contributions to social security. Thus it proposes substituting MESC or Marginal Effective Statutory Charge, for King-Fullerton METR, and enlarging the p-statistics to requirements in terms of labour cost coverage, then reinterpreting it in terms of marginal value added. A further extension to environmental levies as well as a generalisation to any market failure inefficiency loss are also presented. On the other hand the paper intends to emphasize the key role of factor supply elasticities or relative mobility and market rigidities in determining the impact of the - or part of the - MESC statistics on the location decision of an MNE, a Multinational Enterprise. Indeed, in a setting where no rigidities are at work on the market for the immobile factor, like labour, levies on the compensation of that factor don't matter for MNE decision. Unlike that, in a setting where such rigidities are present, they do matter since they refrain the possibility to pass the burden of the tax on the holder of the rather immobile factor. The ultimate goal of the paper is, through the topics mentioned above, to cope with issues especially relevant for interjurisdictional behaviour of multinational entreprises without the framework of a nex Federation like the European Union

Corporate Taxation and Investment Evidence from the Belgian Ace Reform

We contribute to the empirical literature on the relationship between corporate taxes and investment. We exploit the introduction of the so-called ACE corporate tax reform in Belgium that came into effect in January 2006 to evaluate this relationship in a quasiexperimental setting based on firm-level accounting data. To identify the causal effect of the reform on capital spending of Belgian corporations, we focus on the indirect effect of taxes on investment via their impact on free cash-flow. We use the systematic variation of the cash-flow sensitivity of investment between small and medium versus large firms to form treatment and control groups for difference-in-differences (DiD) estimations. Our benchmark results provide highly significant and robust estimates that correspond to an increase in investment activity by small and medium-sized firms of about 3 percent in response to the ACE reform. We substantiate the robustness of our results by means of triple differences estimations (DDD) that use a matched sample of French companies as an additional dimension of contrast

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Politique fiscale et qualité des recettes publiques : éléments d'évaluation et propositions de réforme

Ce chapitre a trait à la politique fiscale et la qualité des recettes publiques : il présente des éléments d'évaluation et des propositions de réform