Investing in times of austerity

European Member States that have signed the treaties on fiscal consolidation are now experiencing difficulties to finance infrastructure and social services. Following the treaties, governments must urgently reduce their loans since their annual budget deficit should not exceed 0.5% of GDP and total sovereign debt should be lowered to 60% of GDP. Moreover Eurostat recently expanded its definition of sovereign debt to include public-private collaboration and financial guarantees by public authorities. The private sector on the other hand is not using its huge amounts of cash to increase production and employment. Instead corporations increase dividends, buy back shares and pay for take-overs and mergers. The latter rarely create jobs and often destroy some. The financial sector invests in the stock market instead of in the productive economy. While the European treaties prohibit additional borrowing by MS, they do not exclude that governments generate higher income. This is possible by preventing the massive tax avoidance and evasion that was recently documented, estimated by the EC at 1000 billion euro annually. Europe should implement and extent actions against tax evasion decided by the OECD, the G20 and the US Treasury. They include automatic exchange of information on bank accounts in more than 40 countries; the BEPS tax Action Plan (OECD-G20, 2013); and, in the US, FATCA (2010) and retroactive actions against tax inversion already effective. Also, the EU should add the earnings in all nations of each multinational, and redistribute this sum to MS using objective criteria. All this does not require a change in legal tax rates in MS. Another lead is taxing capital that leaves the EU if resulting in lower taxation. Each MS should ban rulings that lower the tax revenue. By increasing their internal revenue MS can reduce their debt, and simultaneously finance economic growth, in order to 1) avoid the massive loss of jobs in the public sector decided under austerity policies; 2) remedy the waiting lists in social housing, affordable nurseries, old age homes, hospitals and care for handicapped and refugees, school buildings, insulation, maintenance of roads, canals and rail, green energy, water conservation, and the ridiculous shortage of proper personnel in internal revenue services, the police, justice departments and detention centres, in several MS. This immediate rise in employment will increase demand and business results (updated July 2015)

Resolving unemployment

There are 26 million unemployed in the EU, and no improvement is predicted for several years. But at the same time there are many unremitting needs in social housing, education and culture, nurseries, health, correct treatment of psychiatric patients, care for the elderly and handicapped, personalized help to youngsters in closed institutions, rehabilitation of convicts, public transport, protection of the environment and clean energy, integration of immigrants, more efficient internal revenue services, justice departments and the fight against crime. Publicly funded jobs should be created in these areas that are largely neglected by the commercial sector. The wages paid to the novel jobs will flow immediately into the commercial economy, since families of previously unemployed have many unfulfilled needs. This will raise demand, corporate earnings, private employment, and tax and social security contributions. By the concommitant rise of GDP, the debt ratios will decrease. Poverty and insecurity will disappear for millions of families, and inequality will decrease. The funding required can be assembled by taxing corporations more effectively,by a financial transaction tax of 0.1%, and by European legislation taxing the revenue that is now parked in tax havens. In an immediate step, the ECB should finance governments and agencies at the interest rate offered to banks (0.25%). In the first year the expenditure would be of the same magnitude, or smaller,than the present interventions of the ECB, EU and US governments, or QE by the American Fed and Bank of England. Objections to this proposal are discussed; they are mostly ideological, not economic. Compared to other policies, this proposal is more efficient in creating jobs, and at a cheaper cost for the taxpayer

What hope is there for the 27 million unemployed in Europe?

How many new jobs can be created to resolve unemployment of 27 million? In a first paper I discuss two fallacies that are commonplace, but do not guarantee job creation. One is investment, which has many meanings; but the biggest investments are mergers or take-overs that destroy jobs. So does restructuring of enterprises. Activation of the unemployed is another popular policy, but it does not create jobs

An assessment of the sportfishery on artificial "Liberty Ship" reefs off Port Aransas, Texas

The concept of using surplus World War II Liberty Ships for the construction of artificial reefs to increase the availability of sportfish off the Texas coast was originally suggested in 1974. It became a reality, under the guidance of the Texas Coastal and Marine Council, when three ships were sunk off Port Aransas in the winter of 1976. Since that time, the ships have rapidly become encrusted with algae, anemones, sea urchins, gorgonian coral and other attached marine life. These in turn have provided refuge and food source for a host of small invertebrates and fishes. In June of 1977, one and a half years after ·sinking the first ship, the Texas Coastal and Marine Council commissioned this study to evaluate the impact of the Liberty Ship reefs on sportfishing in the Port Aransas area. For a project such as the Liberty Ship reefs to be successful, there are two criteria: the ships must increase the supply of desirable sportfish and fishermen must be willing to utilize the new resource. The present study is an attempt to evaluate both aspects of the project. A user survey was conducted to determine the amount and type of recreational usage the Liberty Ships receive.A report to the Texas Coastal and Marine Council in fulfillment of Contract No. IAC(76-77)-2149Submitted September 1977Marine Scienc

Aardgas onder de zee van Gaza

De gedetailleerde berichtgeving van de Canadese onderzoeker Michel Chossudovsky belicht een aspekt van de invasie van Gaza, dat onze media (nog) niet hebben (durven) beschrijven. Het is de aanwezigheid van een aardgasveld onder de zee van Gaza, ontdekt door British Gas (BG) maar nog niet geëxploiteerd..

Proposals to fight unemployment

Proposals from several sources for growth and employment in Europe are examined for the number of jobs created and the required budget; as well as the Stimulus program of the Obama Administration (2009). At best, only part of the 27 million unemployed might expect a job by 2020 or 2030 (except for a single proposal). A few explanations are offered for this lack of ambition

Data-analytical stability in second-level fMRI inference

We investigate the impact of decisions in the second-level (i.e. over subjects) inferential process in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) on 1) the balance between false positives and false negatives and on 2) the data-analytical stability (Qiu et al., 2006; Roels et al., 2015), both proxies for the reproducibility of results. Second-level analysis based on a mass univariate approach typically consists of 3 phases. First, one proceeds via a general linear model for a test image that consists of pooled information from different subjects (Beckmann et al., 2003). We evaluate models that take into account first-level (within-subjects) variability and models that do not take into account this variability. Second, one proceeds via permutation-based inference or via inference based on parametrical assumptions (Holmes et al., 1996). Third, we evaluate 3 commonly used procedures to address the multiple testing problem: family-wise error rate correction, false discovery rate correction and a two-step procedure with minimal cluster size (Lieberman and Cunningham, 2009; Bennett et al., 2009). Based on a simulation study and on real data we find that the two-step procedure with minimal cluster-size results in most stable results, followed by the family- wise error rate correction. The false discovery rate results in most variable results, both for permutation-based inference and parametrical inference. Modeling the subject-specific variability yields a better balance between false positives and false negatives when using parametric inference