Austria might not have the biggest prominence on the political stage but as a central European power, bridging eastern and western Europe, its politics can influence others around it. As the country goes to the polls for parliamentary elections this weekend, CNBC looks at why the vote matters. Austrian voters are heading to the polls […]
Read moreEconomists all agree that tax reform is pro-growth if it broadens the base (such as by eliminating deductions) while reducing marginal tax rates. There is less agreement on other aspects of the issue, such as which types of households should see tax cuts, whether a lower corporate rate would benefit workers or shareholders the most, […]
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FOR once, The Daily Mail and the Guardian, British newspapers of the right and left, agree. In the former, Alex Brummer says “IMF’s new line of thinking of tax should please Corbyn & co” while the latter says that the IMF “analysis supports tax strategy of Labour in UK“. Both are responding to the IMF’s […]
Read moreSpain’s Economy Minister Luis de Guindos has described the policies of the Catalan government as “insane” and says trouble in the region is about anarchy rather than independence. De Guindos told CNBC Thursday that he believed no economy could thrive without the rule of law and that the Catalonian government was not acting rationally. “We […]
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THE new app for an upmarket British department store certainly looks the part. Released on Google Play, a shop for Android software, on September 5th, it has the right logo, the correct vibrant colour and offers fashionable clothes and accessories. But the app is not authorised by the brand, is littered with pop-up ads and […]
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SHAREHOLDER meetings in Ohio are not usually the stuff of high drama, but a recent gathering was a nail-biter. Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management, an activist hedge fund, sought a seat on the board of Procter & Gamble (P&G), the world’s largest consumer-goods company, in a proxy vote on October 10th. It was the […]
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THE port city of Kobe, on the southern side of Japan’s main island, is known for luxury beef from pampered cattle, fine sake and precision engineering. Its reputation for the last of those products took a blow on October 8th when one of its oldest industrial firms, Kobe Steel, admitted that that it had falsified […]
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ON OCTOBER 18TH, President Xi Jinping will preside in Beijing over the most important political event in five years. At the Communist Party’s 19th congress much will be made of the triumphs achieved in nearly four decades of reform and opening up. So expect a glossing over of one part of that process where progress […]
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MYANMAR’S democratic transition sometimes seems marked as much by continuity as by change. Depressingly, the army continues its bloody persecution of Rohingya Muslims in the west, for example (see article). But elsewhere moves to open the country’s markets, started by the preceding military regimes, have gathered pace. New commercial and financial services are springing up. […]
Read moreTax reform is never easy, which is why it hasn’t happened since 1986. But it’s harder in 2017 for two fundamental reasons. The political foundation for the current GOP effort is weaker than it was three decades ago. And so is the economic foundation. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan governed with an approval rating of […]
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