CURRENT TRENDS IN TAX HARMONIZATION AND COMPETITION WITHIN THE EUROPEAN UNION

This article treats on the fiscal harmonization process within the European Union being indispensable for assuring loyalty in the competition on its single market, given the fact that different system of taxation had direct and powerful impact on the prices level and on chosing the location for production and distribution activities. Both direct and indirect taxation distort the four fundamental freedoms of the single market. Most of the European Union´s regulations regarding fiscal harmonization resemble to the Directive regarding especially the indirect taxes: VAT, Excises. The fiscal reforms from the member states have to be conceived in such a manner that they take into account the necessity of fiscal harmonization on EU level, creating a reasonable compromise between each country˙s sovereignty and the desideratum of removing fiscal barriers from the normal functioning of the single market.fiscal harmonization, fiscal reform, VAT, income tax, fiscal europeanization

LABOUR TAXATION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

This article proposes an analysis, which we consider extremely useful in the current economic context, of the evolution of labour income fiscality, more precisely, the effect of the public debt growth on the tax wedge for the labour income. The share of fiscal revenues from direct taxes, indirect taxes and social contributions is relatively close in the old member states of the European Union in comparison with the new member states, which register a lower level of income from direct taxes. The low level of income from direct taxes is compensated by more significant shares of the social contributions or indirect taxes. The main motivations of cross-border migration are: a successful career in a multinational corporation, high variations of the tax rate, of the salary income between states and, last but not least, the level of the net salary. To this day, there are no plans to harmonize across the European Union the legislation regarding the taxes wages and the social security contributions. Still, the European Union had in view the coordination of the national tax systems to make sure that the employees and the employers do not pay several times the social contributions in their movement across the community space. Despite the fact that some states tax the labour income at a low level, the labour fiscality remains high in the European Union in comparison with other industrialized economies, probably also due to the fact that the majority of the member states have social market economies. The increase of the fiscality level for the labour income determines the decrease of the employment rate and the raise of the unemployement rate. The solution to guarantee a higher employment rate, which is a target of the European Union Strategy "Europe 2020" could be the relaxation of the labour income fiscality by transferring the tax wedge on the labour income towards property or energy taxation.labour income, social contributions, tax quotas, taxes

THE EVOLUTION OF FISCAL INDICATORS IN THE LAST YEARSIN ROMANIA

Tax revenues are an important part of budget revenues, and their structure represent the mirror of government\'s fiscal policy. Also their level and structure reflects the evolution of the economy in general. The evolution of tax revenues has been influenced by the financial crisis of this period. The tax revenue structure in Romania is characterized by relatively high share of indirect taxes revenues in comparison with another European Union states, where the share of revenues from direct, indirect taxes and social contribution is relatively close. Government expenditure is vital for the economy especially if they are focused on productive areas. They are the engine of economic developments and plays an important role in raising the standard of living of population in a state. In the last years, the growth rate of public expenditure was higher than the trend of tax revenues increase. Sizing revenue and public expenditure is essential for achieving the budget balance target and to meet the criterion stipulated in the Stability and Growth Pact. According to the Pact, the budget deficit may not exceed 3% of GDP. This development asymmetric led to increased deficits in the last years. The high level of structural deficit has canceled an initiative to tax relaxation in this recession period. The need for fiscal consolidation has been paramount in the context of chronic deficit and difficulties faced in financing it. The opportune solution to finance the high public deficit and to achieve the objective of financial stability of the economy was contracting of public debt from International Monetary Fund. Other measures to reduce the deficit were the reduction of public expenditure and increasing tax revenues. We propose in this paper to analyze the evolution of fiscal indicators in comparison with the evolution of macroeconomic indicators to capture the reaction of taxpayers and economic environment at measures adopted.fiscal, tax, fiscal revenues, budget, financial crisis

ANALYSIS OF ROMANIAN SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES BANKRUPTCY RISK

Considering the fundamental role of small and medium enterprises in Romanian economy, this paper aims to quantify the level of their bankruptcy risk for 2009 and 2012 period, after debuting of financial crisis. The main reason of selecting this type of companies is that they represent the backbone of national economy. They have an indispensable role, because they offer jobs for great part of population and their contribution for GDP stimulation is considerable. In this paper it was applied two default risk models, namely the well known Altman’s Z-score model, based on five financial ratios and a bankruptcy predictor model developed by Teti et. al (2012) used firstly exclusively for Italian small and medium-sized enterprise for 2006-2009 period. The model proposed by Teti et. is based on the investigation of financially distressed and financially non-distressed Italian small and medium-sized enterprises during the financial crisis by using a discriminant analysis model. They conclude that there are four financial ratios, which characterized well the small and medium-sized enterprises bankruptcy risk. These variables are financial ratios, like: Debt/Total Assets, Return on Sales (ROS), EBIT/Interest Expenses and Working capital/EBIDTA. They consider that small and medium-sized enterprises require a particular approach in terms of bankruptcy risk analysis. In present study I try to compare the efficiency of traditional bankruptcy risk model with a small and medium-sized specific model. The necessary database for present analysis is ensured by simplified financial reports of 120 small and medium-sized enterprises registered in Bihor County. The selected enterprises are operating in manufacturing industry (21,67%) and trading (78,33%). Present investigation has an important value in actual economic background, where the healthiness and sustainability of small and medium-sized enterprises is a great issue. The results of study shows contradictory results after implementing above mentioned methods, so while after Altman model application, the investigated firms are non financially distressed, in case of second model applying the great part of firms have medium financial problems

BACKTESTING VALUE AT RISK MODELS IN THE PRESENCE OF STRUCTURAL BREAK ON THE ROMANIAN AND HUNGARIAN STOCK MARKETS

Transactions on financial markets are associated with variability, risk and uncertainty, so quantification of risk has a great importance. Beside Standard Deviation and Variance, one of the most involved risk measure methods is Value-at-Risk (VaR). In this study, we use daily return for the stock index from Romania (BET) and Hungary (BUX) for the 01:2007 - 02:2013 periods in order to test the influence of structural breaks on the VaR metrics. We find out that the ARCH phenomenon is present, so we use the GARCH family models. The structural breaks in the series mean and variance are identified using the Zivot-Andrews test and PELT algorithm, the structural break dates are captured using dummy variables in the GARCH models (struc-GARCH), the selection of models is done using the informational criterion [Akaike, Schwarz, Log-likelihood]. The results of present research show a greater volatility associated with a higher risk level in case of Romanian stock index. The stock market indices return follows a negatively skewed and leptokurtic distributions forms either in two cases, so is unspecific a normal distribution. After applying above mentioned tests we can conclude that there are eight structural breaks in BET index returns variance and there are five breakpoints in case of BUX. The breakpoints in mean show very closely results in time, for BET in February 2009 and for BUX March 2009. Backtesting VaR models are done by measuring the number of times the loss is greater than the VaR forecast. The first step for unconditional coverage testing consists in comparing of fraction of VaR violation for a particular risk model. The independence testing it is very important tool in back-testing, because it is not the same that the VaR violations are differentiated in time or there are clustered in some certain period. By checking the independence test, we have the possibility to discover and reject the model with clustered hit sequence. Testing the influence of structural breaks on VaR we find that incorporating structural breaks in the GJR-GARCH models generates lower violations when comparing with the plain GJR-GARCH or RiskMetrics methodology

CURRENT TRENDS IN TAX HARMONIZATION AND COMPETITION WITHIN THE EUROPEAN UNION

This article treats on the fiscal harmonization process within the European Union being indispensable for assuring loyalty in the competition on its single market, given the fact that different system of taxation had direct and powerful impact on the prices level and on chosing the location for production and distribution activities. Both direct and indirect taxation distort the four fundamental freedoms of the single market. Most of the European Unions regulations regarding fiscal harmonization resemble to the Directive regarding especially the indirect taxes: VAT, Excises. The fiscal reforms from the member states have to be conceived in such a manner that they take into account the necessity of fiscal harmonization on EU level, creating a reasonable compromise between each country's sovereignty and the desideratum of removing fiscal barriers from the normal functioning of the single market