Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts

Monday, July 30, 2018

30/7/18: Corruption Perceptions: Tax Havens vs U.S. and Ireland



Transparency International recently released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, a measure of the degree of public concerns with corruption, covering 180 countries. 

The Index is quite revealing. Not a single large economy is represented in the top 10 countries in terms of low perceptions of corruption. Worse, for a whole range of the much ‘talked about’ tax havens and tax optimising states, corruption seems to be not a problem. Switzerland ranks 3rd in the world in public perceptions of corruption, Luxembourg ranks 8th, along with the Netherlands, and the world’s leading ‘financial secrecy’ jurisdictions, the UK. Hong Kong is ranked 13th. Ireland is in a relatively poor spot at 19th place. 

American exceptionalism, meanwhile, continues to shine. The U.S. occupies a mediocre (for its anti-corruption rhetoric and the chest-thumping pursuits of corrupt regimes around the world) 16th place in the Corruption Perception Index, just one place above Ireland, and in the same place as Belgium and Austria (the former being a well-known centre for business corruption, while the latter sports highly secretive and creative, when it comes to attracting foreign cash, financial system). UAE (21st), Uruguay (23rd), Barbados (25th), Bhutan (26th) and more, are within the statistical confidence interval of the U.S. score. 

And consider Europe. While most of the Nordic and ‘Germanic’ Europe, plus the UK and Ireland, are  in top 20, the rest of the EU rank below the U.S. All non-EU Western European countries, meanwhile, are in the top 15. 


Now, in terms of dynamics, using TI’s data that traces comparable indices back to 2012:
- The U.S. performance in terms of corruption remains effectively poor. The country scored 73 on CPI in 2012-2013, and since then, the score roughy remained bounded between 74 and 75. Ireland, however, managed to improve significantly, relative to the past. In 2012, Irish CPI score was 69. Since then, it rose to a peak of 75 in 2015 and is currently standing at 74. So in terms of both 2012 to peak, and peak to 2017 dynamics, Ireland is doing reasonably well, even though we are still suffering from the low starting base. 

Hey, anyone heard of any corruption convictions at the Four Courts recently?

Thursday, May 24, 2018

24/5/18: America, the Medici Cycle and the Corporate Powers in Politics


A recent paper by Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, titled "Towards a Political Theory of the Firm" (NBER Working Paper No. 23593, July 2017: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23593) deals with the issue of rent-seeking behavior by monopolistic firms through political influence. "Neoclassical theory assumes that firms have no power of fiat any different from ordinary market contracting, thus a fortiori no power to influence the rules of the game," writes Zingales. "In the real world, firms have such power. I argue that the more firms have market power, the more they have both the ability and the need to gain political power. Thus, market concentration can easily lead to a “Medici vicious circle,” where money is used to get political power and political power is used to make money."

In his opening to the paper, Zingales notes 2016 report by Global Justice Now showing that 69 of the world’s largest 100 economic entities are now corporations, not governments. Using "both corporation and government revenues for 2015, ten companies appear in the largest 30 entities in the world: Walmart (#9), State Grid Corporation of China (#15), China National Petroleum (#15), Sinopec Group (#16), Royal Dutch Shell (#18), Exxon Mobil (#21), Volkswagen (#22), Toyota Motor (#23), Apple (#25), and BP (#27). All ten of these companies had annual revenue in higher than the governments of Switzerland, Norway, and Russia in 2015. ...In some cases, these large corporations had private security forces that rivaled the best secret services, public relations offices that dwarfed a US presidential campaign headquarters, more lawyers than the US Justice Department, and enough money to capture (through campaign donations, lobbying, and even explicit bribes) a majority of the elected representatives. The only powers these large corporations missed were the power to wage war and the legal power of detaining people, although their political influence was sufficiently large that many would argue that, at least in certain settings, large corporations can exercise those powers by proxy."

Despite this reality, economic theory largely ignores the issue of political power of the firms despite the fact that throughout modern history, "the largest modern corporations facilitated a massive concentration of economic (and political) power in the hands of a few people, who are hardly accountable to anyone." And despite the well-established fact (including through the precedent of the U.S. sanctions), that "...many of those giants (like State Grid, China National Petroleum, and Sinopec) are overseen by a member of the Chinese Communist party." Worse, as Zinglaes notes, "In the United States, hostile takeovers of large corporations have (unfortunately) all but disappeared, and corporate board members are accountable to none. Rarely are they not reelected, and even when they do not get a plurality of votes, they are coopted back to the very same board (Committee on Capital Market Regulation, 2014). The primary way for board members to lose their jobs is to criticize the incumbent CEO (see the Bob Monks experience in Tyco described in Zingales, 2012). The only pressure on large US corporations from the marketplace is exercised by activist investors, who operate under strong political opposition and not always with the interest all shareholders in mind."

So Zingales argues "that the interaction of concentrated corporate power and politics it a threat to the functioning of the free market economy and to economic prosperity it can generate, and a threat to democracy as well." Which, of course, is simply consistent with existence of the set of market-linked trilemmas, such as The International Relations (Order) Trilemma that implies that in the presence of perfect capital mobility, the nation states can either pursue a democratic sovereign political set up or an objective of international stability/order, as well as. (see more on these here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2786660).

Logically, thus, economics need to be asking the following questions, largely ignored in the neo-classical theory of the firm: "To what extent can the power firms have in the marketplace be transformed into political power? To what extent can the political power achieved by
firms be used to protect but also enhance the market power firms have?"

As Zingales notes correctly, "US economic patterns in the last few decades have seen a rise in the relative size of large companies," as also documented in a number of posts on this blog:
for example, the rise of monopolistic competition here:


monopsonistic power here:


effects on regulatory enforcement efficiency here:


effects on democratic institutions here:



As the result, Zinglaes calls "attention to the risk of a “Medici Vicious Circle.” The “signorias” of the Middle Ages—the city-states that were a common form of government in Italy from the 13th through the 16th centuries--were a takeover of a democratic institution (“communes)” by rich and powerful families who ran the city-states with their own commercial interests as main objective. The possibility and extent of this Medici Vicious Circle depend upon several non-market factors. I identify six of them: the main source of political power, the conditions of the media market, the independence of the prosecutorial and judiciary power, the campaign financing laws, and the dominant ideology. I describe when and how these factors play a role and how they should be incorporated in a broader “Political Theory” of the firm."

The driver for this 'Medici Circle' dynamic is market concentration or monopolistic competition. Product differentiation and market regulation can bestow onto a firm a degree of market power that translates into market concentration (rising and significant share of market activity captured by the firm). While in the environment of continued innovation, such competitive advantage generates only temporary abnormal profits, the degree of market power can be significant enough to provide the firm with substantial resources (profits) to engage in lobbying activities, corruption and other rent-seeking activities. There are also symmetric incentives for the firms to engage in rent seeking. As Zinglaes notes: "If the ability to influence the political power increases with economic power, so does the need to do so, because the greater the market power a firm has, the greater the fear of expropriation by the political power". This sounds strange, but it is quite intuitive: as a firm gains market power, it's prices rise above the marginal cost, yielding abnormal economic profits to the firm at the expense of consumers. The Governments can (and do) claim political mandate to limit these profits by taxing the market dominant firms' profits (either through regulation or direct taxation), thus expropriating part of the abnormal profits.

In simple terms, "Most firms are actively engaged in protecting their source of competitive advantage: through a mixture of innovation, lobbying, or both. As long as most of the effort is along the first dimension, there is little to be worried about. ...What is more problematic is when a lot of effort is put into lobbying. In other words, the problem here is not temporary market power. ...The fear is of what I call a “Medici vicious circle,” in which money is used to gain political power and political power is then used to make more money. ...In the case of medieval Italy, it turned Florence from one of the most industrialized and powerful cities in Europe to a marginal province of a foreign empire. At least the Medici period left some examples of great artistic beauty in Florence. I am not sure that market capitalism of the 21st century will be able to do the same."

Zingales relates the Medici circle concept to the modern day U.S. economy. "In the last two decades more than 75 percent of US industries experienced an increase in concentration levels, with the Herfindahl index increasing by more than 50 percent on average. During this time, the size of the average publicly listed company in the United States tripled in market capitalization: from $1.2 billion to $3.7 billion in 2016 dollars... This phenomenon is the result of two trends. On the one hand, the reduction in the rate of birth of new firms, which went from 14 percent in the late 1980s to less than 10 percent in 2014. On the other hand, a very high level of merger activity, which for many years in the last two decades exceeded $2 trillion in value per year... The market power enjoyed by larger firms is also reflected in the increasing difficulty that smaller firms have in competing in the marketplace: in 1980, only 20 percent of small publicly traded firms had negative earnings per share, in 2010, 60 percent did... Barkai (2016) ...finds that the decrease in labor share of value added is not due to an increase in the capital share (that is, the cost of capital times amount of capital divided by value added), but by an increase in the profits share (the residuals), which goes from 2 percent of GDP in 1984 to 16 percent in 2014. ...By separating the return to capital and profits, we can appreciate when profits come from (non-replicable) barriers to entry and competition, not from capital accumulation. Distinguishing between capital and share allows Barkai (2016) also to gain some insights on the cause of the decline in the labor share. If markups (the difference between the cost of a good and its selling price) are fixed, any change in relative prices or in technology that causes a decline in labor share must cause an equal increase in the capital share. If both labor and capital share dropped, then there must be a change in markups—that is, the pricing power firms to charge more than their cost."

And fresh from the presses today: "US IG Chart of the Day: Global M&A deal flow has doubled YTD for a total of $1.5 trillion of announced deals. US-only deals account for about 37% of the global total, for $555 billion of transactions."


While firms require market power to acquire political power, access to political power is required to protect abnormal profits arising from market power. Which, in a highly polarised society (aka, the U.S. system of politics dominated by two mainstream parties) can result in political representation concentrated in the hands of minorities (e.g. Trump Presidency, gained absent major corporate support), and in ineffectiveness of lobbying monitoring (As Zinglaes notes: "Even when it comes to lobbying, the actual amount spent by large U.S corporations is very small, at least as a fraction of their sales. For example, in 2014 Google (now Alphabet) had $80 billion in revenues and spent $16 million in lobbying".) Which is, of course, quite ironic, given that the ongoing Robert Mueller probe of the Trump campaign is focusing almost exclusively on the violations in the legal or declared channels of lobbying, instead of the indirect forms of political influencing.


I will quote Zingales' conclusion almost in full here, for it is a powerful reminder to us all that we live in a world where corporatism (integration of State and corporate powers) and monopolisation / concentration of the markets are two key features of our environment, not only in the economic sense, but in the political / democratic domains as well.

"In a famous speech in 1911, Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, considered the practical advances made by large corporations in the late 19th and early 20th century and stated: 'I weigh my words, when I say that in my judgment the limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times, whether you judge it by its social, by its ethical, by its industrial or, in the long run, ...by its political, effects.' Butler was right, but this discovery of the modern corporate form – like all discoveries – can be used to both to foster progress or to oppress. The size of many corporations exceeds the modern state. As such, they run the risk of transforming small- and even medium-sized states into modern versions of banana republics, while posing economic and political risks even for the large high-income economies. To fight these risks, several political tools might be put into use: increases in transparency of corporate activities; improvements in corporate democracy; better rules against revolving doors and more attention to the risk of capture of scientists and economists by corporate interests; more aggressive use of the antitrust authority; and attention to the functioning and the independence of the media market. Yet the single most important remedy may be broader public awareness."

The latter bit is still woefully lacking in the Fourth Rome of Washington DC, where the usual, tired, unrealistic narrative of American Exceptionalism reigns supreme, and where the U.S. flags at the 4th of July picnics are still confused for meaningful symbols of the U.S. meritocracy and the American Dream, the native entrepreneurialism and the social mobility. Wake up, folks, and smell the roses.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

25/4/18: Draining of the Washington Swamp Reveals Mulvaney


Quote of the month, if not of the year, belongs to yet another Trump Administration 'draing the swamp hero, Mick Mulvaney, currently the White House budget director and, according to some rumours, a prime candidate to be the next Chief of Staff. Speaking at the American Bankers Association, Muvaney, who previously served as a Congressman declared: "We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you're a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn't talk to you. If you're a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you."

So here we have it, folks: top Trump official claiming on the record to have engaged in a cash-for-influence peddling, the very same offence that Trump campaign routinely accused the Clinton Foundation of.

That is some draining of the Washington swamp that President Trump accomplished. Right there, in swamp's prime dweller's own words.

Link to the quote: http://www.businessinsider.com/mick-mulvaney-tells-bankers-donate-to-congress-for-influence-2018-4.

As an aside, Pew Research data shows that the American people, by a large majority, are aware of the deep corruption in Washington. "Americans think that those who donate a lot of money to elected officials have more political influence than others. An overwhelming majority (77%) supports limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns and issues. And nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say new laws could be effective in reducing the role of money in politics." (see http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2018/04/26140617/4-26-2018-Democracy-release.pdf).

One the results: "Overall, nearly six-in-ten Americans (58%) say democracy in the United States is working very or somewhat well, though just 18% say it is working very well. Four-in-ten say it is working not too well or not at all well."
Any surprise, when the likes of Mulvaney are running public offices?

Saturday, April 22, 2017

22/4/17: Two Regimes of Whistle-Blower Protection


“Corporate fraud is a major challenge in both developing and advanced economies, and employee whistle-blowers play an important role in uncovering it.” A truism that is, despite being quite obvious, has been a subject of too little research to-date. One recent study by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (2014), found that the average loss to organisations experiencing fraud that occurs due to financial statement fraud, asset misappropriation, and corruption is estimated losses from impact of corporate fraud globally at around $3.7 trillion. Such estimates are, of course, only remotely accurate. The Global Fraud Report" (2016) showed that 75% of surveyed senior executives stated that their company was a fraud victim in the previous year and in 81% of those cases, at least one company insider was involved, with a large share of such perpetrators (36%) coming from the ranks of company senior or middle management.

Beyond aggregate losses, whistleblowers are significantly important to detection of fraud cases. A 2010 study showed that whistleblowers have been responsible for some 17 percent of fraud discoveries over the period of 1996-2004 for fraud occurrences amongst the large U.S. corporations. And, according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (2014), “employees were the source in 49% of tips leading to the detection of fraud”.


In line with this and other evidence on the impact of fraud-induced economic and social costs, whistleblower protection has been promoted and advanced across a range of countries and institutional frameworks in recent years. An even more glaring gap in our empirical knowledge arises when we attempt to analyse the extent to which such protection has been effective in creating the right legal and operational conditions for whistleblowers to be able to provide our societies with improved information disclosure and corporate governance and regulatory enforcement.

Somewhat filling the latter research gap, a recent working paper, titled “Whistle-Blower Protection: Theory and Experimental Evidence” by Lydia Mechtenberg, Gerd Muehlheusser, and Andreas Roider (CESIFO WORKING PAPER NO. 6394, March 2017) performed “a theory-guided lab experiment in which we analyze the impact of introducing whistle-blower protection. In particular, we compare different legal regimes (“belief-based" versus “fact-based") with respect to their effects on employers' misbehavior, employees' truthful and fraudulent reports, prosecutors' investigations, and employers' retaliation.”

In basic terms, there are two key approaches to structuring whistleblowers protection: belief-based regime (with “less stringent requirements for granting protection to whistle-blowers”) and fact-based regime (with greater hurdles of proof required from whistleblowers in order to avail of the legal protection). The authors’ “results suggest that the latter lead to better outcomes in terms of reporting behavior and deterrence.” The reason is that “when protection is relatively easy to (obtain as under belief-based regimes), fraudulent claims [by whistleblowers] indeed become a prevalent issue. This reduces the informativeness of reports to which prosecutors respond with a lower propensity to investigate. As a consequence, the introduction of such whistle-blower protection schemes might not lead to the intended reduction of misbehavior. In contrast, these effects are mitigated under a fact-based regime where the requirements for protection are more stringent.”

In a sense, the model and the argument behind it is pretty straight forward and intuitive. However, the conclusions are far reaching, given that recent U.S. and UK direction in advancing whistleblowers protection has been in favour of belief-based systems, while european ‘continental’ tradition has been to support fact-based thresholds. As authors do note, we need more rigorous empirical analysis of the effectiveness of two regimes in delivering meaningful discoveries of fraud, while accounting for false cases of disclosures; analysis that captures financial, economic, institutional and social benefits of the former, and costs of the latter.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

21/5/2105: The Darker Side of Transparency?


World Bank paper published earlier this month and titled "The Dark Side of Disclosure: Evidence of Government Expropriation from Worldwide Firms" raises some very interesting questions about the relationship between corporate transparency and government incentives.

The paper by Liu, Tingting and Ullah, Barkat and Wei, Zuobao and Xu, Lixin Colin (May 4, 2015, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 7254: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2602586)  looks at "the effects of voluntary accounting information disclosure through auditing on firm access to finance, exposure to corruption, and sales growth." The authors use data for more than 70,000 firms in 121 countries.

The authors find that "…disclosure can be a double-edged sword" with overall effect depending on institutional capital present in a specific country.

"On the one hand, audited firms exhibit a slightly lower level of financial constraints than unaudited firms." This is in line with traditional theory whereby voluntary transparency increases information quality about the firm, but also signals self-selection of better-governed and better-performing firms to the markets.

"On the other hand, audited firms face a significantly higher level of corruption obstacles." Which is really surprising, until you understand the underlying logic.

"The net effects of voluntary information disclosure on firm growth are negative, which can largely be explained by the fact that most of the countries in the sample are developing countries where institutions are weak. The beneficial effect of disclosure increases as a country's property rights protection improves. The qualitative results are robust to considerations of the endogeneity of auditing and to alternative measures of corruption and financial constraints. The findings reveal the dark side of voluntary information disclosure: exposing firms to government expropriation where institutions are weak."

In other words, in more institutionally-advanced economies, voluntary disclosure is a positive factor for the firms, even she we control for self-selection bias. But in countries where institutional capital is weak, the effect is the opposite: in presence of corrupt and accountable governments, disclosing corporate information to the markets can trigger greater effort by the government to expropriate from the reporting firm.

There are serious ramifications for policy and development economics from this study. Traditionally, we tend to push more transparency and more disclosure for the firms operating in institutionally-weak emerging markets. In doing so, we may be aiding the predatory governments who, thus, gain greater ability to corruptly capture firm assets and/or profits over and above legally required taxation. This, in turn, strengthens the corrupt state institutions and government, instead of pushing them toward adopting more rule of law-styled reforms.

Beyond this, the study results suggest that at least in some setting, less transparency and greater ability for the corporates to operate within private information markets can actually be a good thing.

What is interesting is that in public domain, very little attention is paid to this issue. The results of this study, however, are broadly supportive of Acemoglu and Johnson ("Unbundling Institutions", Journal of Political Economy 113(5), 949–92005, 2005) work on the overwhelming importance of constraining government expropriation in facilitating economic development, ex ante other reforms.

On the other hand, transparency is value-additive in the advanced economies setting, where institutions are sufficiently high quality to preempt (or at the very least, diffuse significantly) the emergence of actionable incentives for state expropriation and information-led corruption.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

6/3/2014: Defending Ireland's Tax Regime Requires Reforms


This is an unedited version of my Sunday Times article from February 16, 2014.


Last week, Irish Government delegation to the OECD's Paris-based headquarters was all smiles and photo-ops at the front end, with lunches and joint press conferences at the back. In-between, there were speeches and statements extolling the virtues of our economic recovery and the Government leadership through the crisis.

Only one cloud obscured the otherwise sunny horizon of the trip: our corporate tax regime. Mentioned in the context of Yahoo’s decision to shift all of its European tax affairs from the ‘high tax’ Switzerland to ‘fully transparent’ Ireland, it required a high level intervention. Aptly, the Taoiseach was standing by to point that our effective corporate tax rate (the average tax rate that applies to companies here) is almost 12 percent, higher than France's 8 percent. Ireland 1: Tax Begrudgers  0.

Case closed? Not so fast.

In recent months, Irish corporate tax regime has featured prominently in international debates about European tax reforms, corporate earnings and multinational investment. G20 and G8 mentioned it, as did German, Finnish, Italian, French, the US and the UK leaders. As financial repression sweeps across the OECD member states in the wake of the sovereign debt crises, this debate is far from over.

This week, Professor James Stewart of TCD School of Business produced an insightful and well-researched analysis showing that the effective tax rate for the US MNCs in Ireland was 2.2% back in 2011. Methodologies bickering aside, Professor Stewart study challenges the core research used to support our corporate tax regime – the PWC studies that focus on domestically-trading SMEs.

The problem of course, is that the official discussions of Irish corporate tax regime are nothing more than a tactic of diffusing the issue by deflecting the real debate. Professor Stewart's research hints at this forcefully. The real issue with our corporate tax is not the headline rate, nor its transparency, but a host of loopholes that riddle the system and that allow companies here to dramatically reduce their global tax exposures well below the 12.5 percent rate.

Some of these loopholes, such as the notorious Double Irish scheme, are the subject of the EU Commission and OECD scrutiny as potentially anti-competitive, subsidy-like measures. Contrary to what public exhortations by our Ministers suggest, the threat is so real, the last Budget saw a closure of one of the more notorious features of our tax law that allowed companies to be registered here without having a tax residency anywhere on the face of Earth.

The core focus of the EU analysis, discussed by the Commissioner Almunia this week, centres on an even more worrisome feature: tax base shifting by the ICT Services MNCs. The practice basically permits MNCs to book vast revenues earned elsewhere in Europe into Ireland in order to move these revenues to tax havens. The issue is non-trivial to Ireland: tax-optimising MNCs currently underwrite virtually all growth officially registered in our economy. Not all of their activities are driven by tax optimisation alone, but our tax regime does serve as a major attractor and does generate significant uplift to our economy. Absent their activities, Irish economy would be in a recession, the Exchequer would be in an unenviable position worse than that of Portugal, and our GDP would be at least one fifth lower than it is today.


Instead of the headline rate of corporate taxation, two core questions about the entire tax regime operating in the Irish economy should be at the heart of our public debates. One: Can Irish economy afford the current tax regime in the long run? Two: Is our tax regime sustainable given the direction of European integration in fiscal, monetary and corporate policies development?

Let's deal with these questions in some details.

Current system of taxation in Ireland is directly contradictory to the core growth and development drivers in our economy. Since the collapse of the property lending and public spending bubbles of the 2000s, our sources of growth have rapidly shifted from domestic investment in real estate and infrastructure toward the skills-dependent ICT services, international financial and professional services, and specialist agrifood and manufacturing sectors.

All of these sectors share two fundamental features. They employ large number of highly skilled and internationally mobile specialists. And, they rely on new value creation via innovation. These features are based on investments in human capital, rather than traditional bricks and mortar or physical machinery. And human capital gets its returns either from entrepreneurial returns or wages. The latter dominate the former across the economy.

Faced with an option of having to pay huge direct and indirect tax rates on their labour income, while receiving virtually no services in return for these outlays, the highly skilled workers tend to run out of Ireland within 1-2 years of arriving here. Forced to compete for talent with tax optimizing MNCs, indigenous entrepreneurs are struggling to generate returns on their own investments. And both, innovation-based MNCs and indigenous producers are facing high and rising costs of recruiting key employees.

In 2013, corporation tax receipts totaled EUR4.27 billion, or 11.3 percent of total tax receipts. This compares to 15.3 percent on average in 2000-2004. Over the same period of time, the share of income tax in total tax receipts rose from 31.4 percent to 40.0 percent. VAT receipts share slipped only marginally from 29.3 percent to 28.9 percent.  Thus, the rate of extraction of tax revenues from households’ incomes rose dramatically. Burden of corporate taxation befalling rapidly growing MNCs, meanwhile, declined in relative terms.

Great Recession only partially explains this trend. Instead, the Government policy consciously shifted tax base away from activities with low economic value added, such as property and transfer pricing-driven corporate profits, and onto the shoulders of the households. Given the changes in 2010-2013 in the composition of our exports of goods and services, Ireland-based MNCs are now paying less in taxes per unit of exports than in the 1990s.

With the tax extraction hitting hard the professional and higher skilled workers earnings, our tax regime is damaging our core source of competitiveness. You don't have to troll the depths of datasets to spot this one. Every Budget since 2009 attracted numerous proposals for attempting to address the problem of income tax costs across ICT services, international financial services and R&D intensive activities. These proposals come from both the indigenous sectors and exporters and MNCs, highlighting the breadth of the problem.


In the longer run, Irish economy's reliance on tax arbitrage is similar to the 'curse of oil'. Low effective corporate tax rate accompanied by a very high upper marginal income tax and sky-high indirect levies are driving investment, as well as financial and human capital, away from well-anchored indigenous sectors and toward foot-loose MNCs.

This, in turn, exposes us to cyclical changes in MNCs global production patterns. We have already experienced such events in the late 1990s - early 2000s when ICT manufacturing and dot.com sectors evaporated from this country virtually overnight. And today we are witnessing global re-allocation and re-shaping of pharmaceutical industry. We got lucky in the 2000s when domestic economy bubble replaced deflating MNCs presence. We also got lucky this time around, with pharma patent cliff being compensated for by growing exports of ICT services. With every iteration of these risks, levels of employment in the MNCs per euro of export revenues have been falling. Next time around, things might not turn out to be as easy to manage.

Double-Irish and other loopholes are also costing us in terms of reputational and institutional capital - two major contributors to making Ireland an attractive location for international business and key environmental factors supporting indigenous entrepreneurship. While many MNCs for now have little problem dealing with tax havens, they tend to locate little but shell presence in these jurisdictions. Ireland, not being an official tax haven, offers an attractive alternative for them to both create tax optimising structures and put some real activity on the ground. However, should our reputation continue to suffer from the publicity our tax regime receives around the world as of late, this acceptability of Ireland as a real platform for doing business can change. Reputations, not made overnight, can fall in an instant, and Ireland has plenty competitors in Europe hoping for such an outrun.

Which brings us to the question of whether our tax regime is sustainable in the long run given the current policy climate in the EU and across the Atlantic. The answer to it is a ‘no’.

As this week’s comments by Commissioner Almunia and the numerous previous statements from G20, G8 and the OECD clearly indicate, governments across the advanced economies are moving to curb excessive tax optimisation strategies by the multinationals. In doing so, they are not about to sacrifice their own long-established economic systems. The main driver for this global resurgence of interest in tax avoidance and optimisation is the ongoing process of long-term structural deleveraging of public debts. Another key driver is a long-term restructuring of unfunded pensions and social welfare liabilities accumulated by the advanced economies now staring into the prospect of rapid onset of demographic ageing. Put simply, over the next 16 years, through 2030, advanced economies around the world will be facing a need to fund fiscal and retirement systems gaps of between 9 and 25 percent of current GDP. This funding is unlikely to materialise from growth in GDP alone, and will require significant restructuring of tax revenues.


One way or the other, Irish tax system will have to be reformed. The longer we resist an open and constructive debate about the entire tax system, the more likely that these reforms will be imposed onto us by the EU dictate.  To enhance our reputational and institutional capital, we need to aggressively curb tax optimisation schemes. To develop a domestically-anchored innovation-based economy, we need to shift some burden of income-related tax measures onto corporates. The best way to achieve these objectives is to protect our low corporate tax rate and close the egregious loopholes.




BOX-OUT:

Earlier this month, the EU Commission published a report into public perceptions of corruption across the EU. The findings were described by the EU Home Affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem as exposing a "breathtaking" spread of corruption across the everyday lives of the European citizens. For starters, total annual cost of corruption to the European economy was estimated at EUR120 billion or roughly 10 percent of the EU GDP. According to Ms Malmstroem, the true costs are "probably much higher".

Ireland fared relatively well in the report findings, compared to the worst offenders – the member states of Eastern and Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Still, one third of Irish respondents expressed concern that officials awarding public tenders and building permits are corrupt. More than one fifth of Irish people surveyed thought that various inspectors serving the state are on the take – hardly a solid vote of confidence in our systems.

Spain and the Netherlands were the only two countries where a majority of respondents thought that corruption is widespread among banks and financial institutions, but Ireland was a close third with 48 percent.

The good news is that 13 percent (a relatively high proportion by European standards) of Irish respondents felt that corruption has decreased in the past 3 years. Bad news is that the vast majority believes that there was no improvement at all.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

3/12/2013: Corruption Perceptions Index 2013: Ireland

Transparency International has published its annual Corruption Perceptions Index 2013.

Ireland rank in the global corruption table moved from 25th in 2012 to 21st in 2013. An improvement. However, historically, this year's ranking represents the third poorest ranking in any year since 1998.

Two charts to illustrate:



In Western Europe, Ireland scores respectable 12th, and we score 6th in the euro area. Only nine states of the euro area score in top 30 countries in 2013, eleven in top 40 and fifteen in top 50.


Monday, April 2, 2012

2/4/2012: Impact of the middle class on economic, social and political institutions

A fascinatingly interesting study of the effects the middle class has on economic, social and political institutions.

The World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6015: "Do Middle Classes Bring Institutional Reforms?" by Norman Loayza Jamele Rigolini Gonzalo Llorente (link here - emphasis mine) "examines the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a new cross-country panel dataset on the distribution of income and expenditure." The data "spans 672 yearly observations across 128 countries" allowing the authors "...to gauge whether a larger middle class has a causal effect on policy and institutional outcomes in three areas:

  • social policy in health and education 
  • market- oriented economic structure and 
  • quality of governance." 
The study finds that "when the middle class becomes larger (measured as the proportion of people earning more than US$10 a day),

  • social policy on health and education becomes more progressive [expansion of share of these expenditures to GDP], and 
  • the quality of governance (democratic participation and official corruption) also improves. 
  • This trend does not occur at the expense of economic freedom, as a larger middle class also leads to more market-oriented economic policy on trade and finance." 
From data (econometrics) perspective: "These beneficial effects of a larger middle class appear to be more robust than the impact of lower poverty, lower inequality or higher gross domestic product per capita."

The causality of the latter effect is itself an interesting point: "That may be linked to the evolution of the middle class: they are more enlightened, more likely to take political actions and have a stronger voice. They also share preferences and values for policy and institutional reforms, as well as higher stakes in property rights and wealth accumulation."

The authors note that their results show that "the indicators of poverty and inequality are also relevant determinants for social policies, economic structure, and governance quality, but not always in the expected way or with the consistency shown by the middle class measure. For instance, a decrease in income inequality seems to produce a decline in official corruption (as possibly expected) but also a reduction in democratic participation (which may be harder to explain). Similarly, a decrease in the poverty headcount appears to induce a liberalization of international trade but also, surprisingly, a constriction of credit markets."

Fascinating stuff, in my view.