In 2001, China signed the protocol for accession to the WTO. At that time, most western countries believed China would soon embrace democracy and free markets. Therefore, they agreed upon a limited period of 15 years for certain strict anti-dumping procedures and duties specific to China. They assumed that those measures would undoubtedly be unnecessary long before […]
“Many people want the government to protect the consumer, while a much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government”, Milton Friedman said. And it is truer than ever today, since the digital economy and its rules don’t seem to run at the same speed. As a result, many governments around the […]
A spectre is haunting Europe: multinational enterprises are taking advantage of globalisation and free movement of capital within the European Union to arrange sophisticated tax planning structures. Knocking down their fiscal burdens and thus allegedly giving rise to a massive tax avoidance operation, and violating the principle of fair taxation by jeopardizing the finances of […]
There is a political lesson to learn from today’s digital transformation: where socialism has failed, technology can succeed. Capitalism is indeed often charged with the steadily exclusive and increasingly concentrated ownership of the means of production. Nowadays, however, as the meme goes, the largest taxi company worldwide (Uber) owns no vehicles; the largest provider of […]
Global inequality is a relatively recent phenomenon. For a large proportion of human existence, societies existed in what was accepted as ‘the natural state of mankind’ – where everyone was more or less equally impoverished. Feudalism, particularly in Western Europe, changed that to the extent that a handful of individuals achieved massive wealth and status […]
Every year, several international organisations and think tanks monitor the index of economic freedom of different countries worldwide. Sometimes those indicators receive some attention by the media, but in most cases the coverage is only superficial and does not delve deeper into the methodology and criteria underpinning their results. Yet a deeper analysis of those […]
