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"Sinn, Hans-Werner, author"
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Can Germany be saved? : the malaise of the world's first welfare state
A prominent economist argues in this German bestseller that Germany can rescue its sluggish economy by transforming its social welfare system and reforming its labor market and tax structure, offering insights into economic dilemmas experienced by all advanced economies in a time of globalization.
eBook
The Green Paradox
The Earth is getting warmer. Yet, as Hans-Werner Sinn points out in this provocative book, the dominant policy approach--which aims to curb consumption of fossil energy--has been ineffective. Despite policy makers' efforts to promote alternative energy, impose emission controls on cars, and enforce tough energy-efficiency standards for buildings, the relentlessly rising curve of CO2 output does not show the slightest downward turn. Some proposed solutions are downright harmful: cultivating crops to make biofuels not only contributes to global warming but also uses resources that should be devoted to feeding the world's hungry. In The Green Paradox, Sinn proposes a new, more pragmatic approach based not on regulating the demand for fossil fuels but on controlling the supply. The owners of carbon resources, Sinn explains, are pre-empting future regulation by accelerating the production of fossil energy while they can. This is the \"Green Paradox\": expected future reduction in carbon consumption has the effect of accelerating climate change. Sinn suggests a supply-side solution: inducing the owners of carbon resources to leave more of their wealth underground. He proposes the swift introduction of a \"Super-Kyoto\" system--gathering all consumer countries into a cartel by means of a worldwide, coordinated cap-and-trade system supported by the levying of source taxes on capital income--to spoil the resource owners' appetite for financial assets.Only if we can shift our focus from local demand to worldwide supply policies for reducing carbon emissions, Sinn argues, will we have a chance of staving off climate disaster.
eBook
The knowledge capital of nations
In this book the authors make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but the authors argue that message has become distorted, with politicians and researchers concentrating not on valued skills but on proxies for them. The common focus is on school attainment, although time in school provides a very misleading picture of how skills enter into development. The authors contend that the cognitive skills of the population-which they term the \"knowledge capital\" of a nation-are essential to long-run prosperity. The authors subject their hypotheses about the relationship between cognitive skills (as consistently measured by international student assessments) and economic growth to a series of tests, including alternate specifications, different subsets of countries, and econometric analysis of causal interpretations. They find that their main results are remarkably robust, and equally applicable to developing and developed countries. They demonstrate, for example, that the \"Latin American growth puzzle\" and the \"East Asian miracle\" can be explained by these regions' knowledge capital. Turning to the policy implications of their argument, they call for an education system that develops effective accountability, promotes choice and competition, and provides direct rewards for good performance. (Orig.).
eBook
From Optimal Tax Theory to Tax Policy
Many things inform a country's choice of tax system, including political considerations, public opinion, bureaucratic complexities, and ideas drawn from theoretical analysis. In this book, Robin Boadway examines the role of optimal tax analysis in informing and influencing tax policy design. Scholars of public economics formulate models of optimal tax-transfer systems based on normative principles that reflect efficiency and equity considerations. They use that analysis to form views about the optimal design or reform of actual tax systems that are much more complicated than their models. Boadway argues that there is an important symbiosis between ideas drawn from normative tax analysis and tax policies actually enacted. Ideas germinated by normative analyses have led to the widespread adoption of the value-added tax, the use of refundable tax credits, and various business tax reforms. Other ideas provide rationales for existing features of tax systems, including the tax treatment of retirement savings and human capital investment. Boadway charts the evolution of optimal tax analysis and discusses the lessons it holds for tax policy. He describes the theoretical challenges posed by recent findings in such fields as behavioral economics and social choice and considers how optimal tax analysis might adapt to these new paradigms. His analysis offers a timely assessment of the role that optimal tax theory has played in establishing the principles that continue to inform tax policy.
eBook
Taxation, incomplete markets, and social security : the 2000 Munich lectures
In this book Peter Diamond analyzes social security as a particular example of optimal taxation theory. Assuming a world of incomplete markets and asymmetric information, he uses a variety of simple models to illuminate the economic forces that bear on specific social security policy issues. The focus is on the degree of progressivity desirable in social security and the design of incentives to delay retirement beyond the earliest age of eligibility for benefits. Before analyzing these models, Diamond presents introductions to optimal income tax theory and the theory of incomplete markets. He incorporates recent theoretical developments such as time-inconsistent preferences into his analyses and shows that distorting taxes and a measure of progressivity in benefits are desirable. Diamond also discusses social security reform, with a focus on Germany.
eBook
The Indirect Side of Direct Investment
The recent increase in cross-border flows of foreign direct investment has sharpened the research focus on multinational taxation. In this book, taxation experts Jack Mintz and Alfons Weichenrieder examine how multinational corporations use indirect financing structures--organizing themselves into groups with several tiers of ownership--to reduce worldwide taxes. They spell out in detail how different tax policies affect corporations' choice of financing structures, discussing the issues in both theoretical and empirical terms. Drawing on a unique data set (MiDi) on German multinationals provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt, Mintz and Weichenrieder confirm the prevalence of indirect financing structures for both outbound and inbound German investment. They find evidence of \"treaty shopping\" to avoid withholding taxes (using a third country with more favorable tax rates as a conduit through which to route investments) and of \"debt shifting.\" Mintz and Weichenrieder argue that increasing our knowledge of the tax reasons behind conduit investment will lead to a better understanding of how tax policy can affect macroeconomic flows of capital in the global economy. They review the trade-offs that governments face and discuss policy options, considering not only possible changes to corporate income tax policy but also the potential influence of international cooperation on countries' domestic tax policy.
eBook
Happiness
Revolutionary developments in economics are rare. The conservative bias of the field and its enshrined knowledge make it difficult to introduce new ideas not in line with received theory. Happiness research, however, has the potential to change economics substantially in the future. Its findings, which are gradually being taken into account in standard economics, can be considered revolutionary in three respects: the measurement of experienced utility using psychologists' tools for measuring subjective well-being; new insights into how human beings value goods and services and social conditions that include consideration of such non-material values as autonomy and social relations; and policy consequences of these new insights that suggest different ways for government to affect individual well-being. In Happiness, emphasizing empirical evidence rather than theoretical conjectures, Bruno Frey substantiates these three revolutionary claims for happiness research. After tracing the major developments of happiness research in economics and demonstrating that we have gained important new insights into how income, unemployment, inflation, and income demonstration affect well-being, Frey examines such wide-ranging topics as democracy and federalism, self-employment and volunteer work, marriage, terrorism, and watching television from the new perspective of happiness research. Turning to policy implications, Frey describes how government can provide the conditions for people to achieve well-being, arguing that a crucial role is played by adequate political institutions and decentralized decision making. Happiness demonstrates the achievements of the economic happiness revolution and points the way to future research.Bruno S. Frey is Professor of Economics at the University of Zurich, Visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Research Director of CREMA (Center for Research in Economics, Management, and the Arts). He is co-editor of Economics and Psychology: A Promising New Cross-Disciplinary Field (MIT Press, 2007).
eBook
Firms in the International Economy
Despite their common roots, international economics (IE) and international business (IB) have developed into two distinct fields of study. Economists have directed their efforts at formalizing the workings of international trade and investment at the macroeconomic level; business scholars have relied more on data-driven conceptual narratives than mathematical tools. But the recent focus of IE literature on firm heterogeneity suggests that IE would benefit from IB analyses of the behavior and organization of the internationalizing firm. The contributions to this volume investigate ways that insights from IB can enrich IE research in firm heterogeneity.The contributors discuss firm-specific advantages in international trade and investment, considering the firm as the unit of analysis and managerial inputs as a variable in market entry decisions; analyze interactions between a firm and its external environment, including local corporate philanthropy and institutional settings; examine the boundaries of the firm and organizational choices such as the make-or-buy decision; and investigate technology transfer and innovation offshoring, discussing the role of subsidiaries, inventor employment, and other related topics. Although IE and IB look at international firms from different perspectives, these contributions make it clear that there is a potential for a productive exchange of insights and information between the two disciplines.ContributorsLaura Abramovsky, Carlo Altomonte, Sjoerd Beugelsdijk, Bruce Blonigen, Pamela Bombarda, Steven Brakman, Julia Darby, Rodolphe Desbordes, Filippo Di Mauro, María García-Vega, Harry Garretsen, Elena Huergo, Florian Mayneris, Quyen T. K. Nguyen, Verena Nowak, Cheyney O'Fallon, Gianmarco Ottaviano, Michael Pflüger, Filomena Pietrovito, Sandra Poncet, Alberto Franco Pozzolo, Alan M. Rugman, Armando Rungi, Stephan Russek, Davide Sala, Luca Salvatici, Christian Schwarz, Roger Smeets, Jens Suedekum, Hans van Ees, Vincent Vicard, Ian Wooton, Erdal Yalcin
eBook