Suchergebnisse

International audience ; Two main nonpharmaceutical policy strategies have been used in Europe in response to the COVID-19 epidemic: one aimed at natural herd immunity and the other at avoiding saturation of hospital capacity by crushing the curve. The two strategies lead to different results in terms of the number of lives saved on the one hand and production loss on the other hand. Using a susceptible–infected–recovered–dead model, we investigate and compare these two strategies. As the results are sensitive to the initial reproduction number, we estimate the latter for 10 European countries for each wave from January 2020 till March 2021 using a double sigmoid statistical model and the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker data set. Our results show that Denmark, which opted for crushing the curve, managed to minimize both economic and human losses. Natural herd immunity, sought by Sweden and the Netherlands does not appear to have been a particularly effective strategy, especially for Sweden, both in economic terms and in terms of lives saved. The results are more mixed for other countries, but with no evident trade-off between deaths and production losses.

International audience ; L'histoire officielle de la découverte du gisement de Potosí (Bolivie) permet de justifier la prise de possession de la montagne d'argent. De nombreux travaux de ces dernières années ont commencé à développer un nouveau regard sur le passé de Potosi et sur le début de la colonisation. Ils permettent de retracer les relations politiques régionales liant les populations locales avec les deux envahisseurs, Incas et Espagnols. Depuis 1990, des prospections ont été conduites aboutissant à une cartographie des sites métallurgiques à Potosí. Quelques anciennes entrées de mine ont pu être localisées sur le Cerro Rico. Le système de production de l'argent est maintenant bien appréhendé grâce à des opérations archéologiques menées sur plusieurs unités de production dans le département de Potosí. La reconstruction de ce savoir-faire technique indien met en lumière les luttes de pouvoir pour le contrôle de la production d'argent.

We examine if and how news coverage influences governments' humanitarian aid allocations, from the perspective of the senior bureaucrats involved in such decision-making. Using rare in-depth interviews with 30 directors and senior policymakers in 16 of the world's largest donor countries, we found that the majority of these bureaucrats believed that sudden-onset, national news coverage can increase levels of emergency humanitarian aid allocated to a crisis. They said that this influence operated by triggering other accountability institutions (the public, civil society, elected officials) who put pressure on aid bureaucracies to announce additional funding. However, these practitioners claim that annual humanitarian aid allocations—which are much larger—are unaffected by news pressure. Intriguingly, we also find that many respondents interpret a lack of news coverage as grounds for increasing their annual aid allocations to what they call "forgotten crises". We argue that "bureaucratic mediatisation", rather than the "CNN Effect" or the "Cockroach Effect", provides the most appropriate theoretical perspective to understand these multiple, concurrent and indirect forms of media influence. These findings have important implications for government donors, news organisations and aid agencies, and for our wider understanding of how news coverage may influence foreign policy.

International audience ; L'histoire officielle de la découverte du gisement de Potosí (Bolivie) permet de justifier la prise de possession de la montagne d'argent. De nombreux travaux de ces dernières années ont commencé à développer un nouveau regard sur le passé de Potosi et sur le début de la colonisation. Ils permettent de retracer les relations politiques régionales liant les populations locales avec les deux envahisseurs, Incas et Espagnols. Depuis 1990, des prospections ont été conduites aboutissant à une cartographie des sites métallurgiques à Potosí. Quelques anciennes entrées de mine ont pu être localisées sur le Cerro Rico. Le système de production de l'argent est maintenant bien appréhendé grâce à des opérations archéologiques menées sur plusieurs unités de production dans le département de Potosí. La reconstruction de ce savoir-faire technique indien met en lumière les luttes de pouvoir pour le contrôle de la production d'argent.

International audience ; In a global context of rising populism, the Front National (which became Rassemblement National in 2018) has obtained very high electoral scores in France in recent years. Many observers conclude that there is a "return of French nationalism". Is this analysis relevant? Our hypothesis is that it deserves to be qualified. To verify this, we propose to break the question down into three successive themes for reflection.First of all, can we designate French nationalism as if it were a single phenomenon? The FN/RN is developing a right-wing identity-based and sovereignist approach, but are there not other forms and political colours of nationalism in France? Secondly, the very notion of nationalism, in general, is far from unambiguous. In addition to the multiplicity of definitions, the dimensions of nationalism are diverse and analytical approaches to it contrasting. Finally, is the notion of return relevant? Saying "return of French nationalism", in fact, implies that it had faded or disappeared. Is that, in fact, correct? Has it not rather been constantly metamorphosed, according to the "political offering" and to the socio-historical context?While it is indisputable that the results of the FN/RN have exploded and that the themes of xenophobia, intolerance of Islam and the demand for authority have recently developed in French public opinion, the idea of a "return of French nationalism" is nevertheless an oversimplification of reality, which borders on error. French nationalism has in fact never disappeared, and it would therefore be more appropriate to reason in terms of a sharp rise of a particular type of nationalism (exclusionist right-wing and far-right nationalism) without, however, other types of French nationalism ceasing to exist (banal nationalism and left-wing nationalism).Perhaps this nuanced approach can be extended to cases other than France? Nationalism could then be seen as a universal and permanent - but constantly evolving - collective phenomenon and not as a sudden ...

International audience ; This article proposes to review the ramparts built over the oppida in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, their functions and their relationship withhistorical events, in particular the invasions of the Cimbres and Teutons and the conquest of Caesar. Not all ramparts have the same objectives:some of them are designed as permanent fortifications and are part of the urban and long-term project, others are emergency defences built inthe face of an imminent threat. This article examines the power of ramparts in war and peace, and the role of the oppidum as the motor principleof a phenomenon of militarisation emerging in late Iron Age societies. ; Cet article propose de faire le point sur les remparts édifiés sur les oppida aux II e et I er s. av. J.-C., sur leurs fonctions et leurs relations avec les événements historiques, en particulier les invasions des Cimbres et des Teutons puis la conquête de César. Tous les remparts n'ont pas les mêmes objectifs : certains sont conçus comme des fortifications permanentes et s'inscrivent dans le projet urbain et la longue durée, d'autres sont des ouvrages d'urgence édifiés face à une menace imminente. Cet article s'interroge sur le pouvoir des remparts dans la guerre et dans la paix ainsi que sur le rôle de l' oppidum comme principe moteur d'un phénomène de militarisation qui émerge dans les sociétés de la fin de l'âge du Fer.

Decentralization policy forms part of a broader global ideology and effort of the international donor community in favor of subsidiarity and local participation, and represents a paradigm shift from top-down command-and-control systems. Since 2003, the formalization of property rights through titling became an integral component of decentralized land administration efforts in Ghana. The creation of new forms of local government structures and the related changes in the distribution of responsibilities between different levels of government have an impact on natural resource management, the allocation of rights, and the unequal distribution of powers. This paper aims to understand how decentralization reforms modify the balance of power between public administration, customary authorities, and resource end-users in Ghana. Decentralization's impact is analyzed based on two case studies. Relying on purposive and snowball sampling techniques, and mixed methods, we conducted 8 key informant interviews with local government bureaucrats in land administration, 16 semi-structured interviews with allodial landholders, 20 biographic interviews and 8 focus group discussions with small-scale farmers. The interviews analyzed the institutions and the roles of actors in land administration. Our case studies show that decentralization has the tendency to increase local competition in land administration where there are no clear distribution of power and obligation to local actors. Local competition and elitism in land administration impact the ability of small-scale farmers to regularize or formalize land rights. Thus, the paper concludes that local competition and the elitism within the land administration domain in Ghana could be the main obstacles towards decentralization reforms.

This paper considers the feasibility of implementing a progressive wealth tax to collect additional government revenue to both reinforce fiscal sustainability in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis and reduce persistent extreme inequality in South Africa. Drawing on our new companion paper, we first identify the tax base and discuss the design of potential tax schedules. Testing alternative tax schedules, we estimate how much additional revenue could be collected from a progressive tax on the top 1% richest South Africans. Our results show that under conservative assumptions, a wealth tax could raise between 70 and 160 billion Rands—1.5% to 3.5% of the South African GDP.We discuss in turn how sensitive our estimates are to assumptions on (1) mismeasurement of wealth and (2) tax avoidance and evasion, based on the most recent tax policy literature. We examine technical issues related to the enforcement of the tax, and how third-party reporting and pre-filled declarations could be used to optimize measurement of taxable wealth and minimize evasion and avoidance opportunities. Finally, we explain how this new tax could interact with other capital related taxes already in place in South Africa, and discuss the potential impact on growth.

This study estimates how much tax revenue the European Union could collect by imposing a minimum tax on the profits of multinational companies. We compute the tax deficit of multinational firms, defined as the difference between what multinationals currently pay in taxes, and what they would pay if they were subject to a minimum tax rate in each country. We then consider three ways for EU countries to collect this tax deficit.First, we simulate an international agreement on a minimum tax of the type currently discussed by the OECD, favored by a number of European Union countries, and by the United States. In this scenario, each EU country would collect the tax deficit of its own multinationals. For instance, if the internationally agreed minimum tax rate is 25% and a German company has an effective tax rate of 10% on the profits it records in Singapore, then Germany would impose an additional tax of 15% on these profits to arrive at an effective rate of 25%. More generally, Germany would collect extra taxes so that its multinationals pay at least 25% in taxes on the profits they book in each country. Other nations would proceed similarly. We find that such a 25% minimum tax would increase corporate income tax revenues in the European Union by about €170 billion in 2021. This sum represents more than 50% of the amount of corporate tax revenue currently collected in the European Union and 12% of total EU health spending.The revenue potential of a coordinated minimum tax is thus large. However, revenues significantly depend on the commonly agreed minimum tax rate. With a 21% minimum rate, the European Union would collect about €100 billion in 2021. Moving from 21% to 15% would reduce the potential revenue by a factor of two to about €50 billion.Second, we simulate an incomplete international agreement in which only EU countries apply a minimum tax, while non-EU countries do not change their tax policies. In this scenario, each EU country would collect the tax deficit of its own multinationals (as in our first scenario), plus a portion of the tax deficit of multinationals incorporated outside of the European Union, based on the destination of sales. For instance, if a British company makes 20% of its sales in Germany, then Germany would collect 20% of the tax deficit of this company. We find that that in such a scenario, using a rate of 25% to compute the tax deficit of each multinational, the European Union would increase its corporate tax revenues about €200 billion. Out of this total, €170 billion would come from collecting the tax deficit of EU multinationals; an additional €30 billion would come from collecting a portion of the tax deficit of non-EU multinationals. For the European Union, there is thus a much higher revenue potential from increasing taxes on EU companies than from taxing non-EU companies.To improve the fairness of its tax system and generate new government revenues (e.g., to pay for the cost of Covid-19), it is essential that the European Union polices its own multinationals.Last, we estimate how much revenue each EU country could collect unilaterally, assuming all other countries keep their current tax policy unchanged. This corresponds to a "first-mover" scenario, in which one country alone decides to collect the tax deficit of multinational companies. This first mover would collect the full tax deficit of its own multinationals, plus a portion (proportional to the destination of sales) of the tax deficit of all foreign multinationals, based on a reference rate of 25%.We find that a first mover in the European Union would increase its corporate tax revenues by close to 70% relative to its current corporate tax collection. Although international coordination is always preferable, a unilateral move of a single EU member state (or a group of member states) would encourage other EU countries to also collect the tax deficit of multinationals—as not doing so would mean leaving tax revenues on the table for the first movers to grab. This could pave the way for an ambitious agreement on a high minimum tax, within the European Union and then globally. This analysis shows that unilateral action can play a transformative role and that refusing international coordination is not a sustainable solution, since other countries can always choose to collect the taxes that tax havens choose not to collect.Our estimates are based on a transparent methodology that combines newly available macroeconomic data on the location and effective tax rates of multinational profits.We illustrate and validate our approach by applying it to firm-level data publicly disclosed by all European banks and 16 large non-bank multinationals. We find that European banks would have to pay 41% more in taxes if they were subject to a 25% country-by-country minimum tax. This estimate is in line with our finding that EU multinationals as a whole (all sectors combined) would have to pay around 50% more in taxes, thus suggesting that this number is indeed the correct order of magnitude.Companies such as Shell, Iberdrola, and Allianz—who voluntarily disclose their country-by-country profits and taxes—would also have to pay 35%-50% more in taxes if they were subject to a 25% minimum tax.This report is supplemented by a pioneering interactive website, https://tax-deficitsimulator.herokuapp.com. This new tool allows policy makers, journalists, members of civil society, and all citizens in each EU country to assess the revenue potential from minimum taxation on both domestic and foreign firms. Users can select various scenarios (e.g., international coordination or unilateral action), and a full range of minimum tax rates from 10% to 50%. All the data and computer code are available online, making our estimates fully reproducible. We plan to regularly update our findings, as improved and more comprehensive macroeconomic data sources become available, refined estimation techniques are designed, and more companies publicly disclose their country-by-country reports.

By utilizing practical examples from the Abteilung für Psychatrie [psychiatric ward] at the Landeskrankenanstalt [province hospital] in Carinthia, Austria, in the wake of the two World Wars, this article seeks to explore the stories of hospitalized women and girls after armistices and peace treaties. Whereas the dialectics of conflict and resulting post-conflict traumas became increasingly accepted by medics for combat-ants during that time frame, this was not necessarily the case for comparable traumatic experiences of female civilians. Instead, for these patients, the Freudian definition of hysteria prevailed as a stereotypical 'feminine' symptom. Accordingly, post-war tran-sitions from 1918 and 1945 onwards, with critical, sometimes even unstable, material and political infrastructures, consolidated a decidedly gender-related notion of trauma. This monopoly of trauma diagnoses, reserved for male patients, hence even resulted in misogyny towards institutionalized women, especially when they were refugees or displaced persons. As this study attempts to show, the mapping of mental illness or normality was heavily determined by sex, class, or ethnic background and in most instances served as an administrative tool for socio-political ends. The research for this contribution is based on archival work conducted for an ERC Advanced Grant, entitled "EIRENE — Post-War Transitions in Gendered Perspective: The Case of the North-Eastern Adriatic Region.â€

This paper analyses the transformation of electoral cleavages in Brazil since 1989 using a novel assembly of electoral surveys. Brazilian political history since redemocratization is largely a history of the rise and fall of the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT). We show that the election of Lula da Silva as President in 2002, followed by the implementation of redistributive policies by successive PT governments, was at the origin of the marked socioeconomic cleavages that emerged. In a relatively short space of time the PT transformed itself from a party of the young, highly educated, high-income elite of the Southern party of the country, to a party of the poor and lesser educated voters, increasingly located in the disadvantaged region of the Northeast. Controlling for a host of socio-demographic factors, a voter in the Northeast was 20 percentage points more likely to vote for the PT in 2018 than voters in other regions, compared to being 5 percentage points less likely to do so in 1989. In sharp contrast to other western democracies, political conflict in Brazil has followed an increasingly unidimensional class-based path. This culminated in the unification of elites and large parts of the middle class behind Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential election. We argue that contextual policy-driven factors and programmatic alliances are key to understand the PT's singular evolution, and thus the transformation of electoral cleavages in Brazil.

National audience ; The zero-interest green loan (ZIGL) programme allows French homeowners to finance home energy retrofits at zero interest rate. Launched in 2009 in the wake of the Grenelle de l'environnement, the programme has strongly underperformed expectations. As the Citizen Convention for Climate now recommends extending the programme, we examine the reasons for the gap between predicted and realized ZIGLs. We find it to be best explained by a lack of profitability for banks. As a consequence, banks exploit consumers' lack of information about the programme to sell them more conventional financial products. In contrast, the role played by other frequently-cited causes, such as high transaction costs and a low interest rate environment, seems to be modest. We conclude that the efficiency of the programme could be improved by assigning loan issuance to a public bank. ; L'éco-prêt à taux zéro (EPTZ) permet aux propriétaires de logements de financer des travaux de rénovation énergétique sans payer d'intérêts. Lancée en 2009, cette politique phare du Grenelle de l'environnement n'a pas rencontré le succès escompté. Aujourd'hui, la Convention citoyenne pour le climat (2020) propose de généraliser l'EPTZ. Pour juger de l'opportunité d'une telle mesure, nous nous interrogeons sur les causes possibles de l'écart entre le nombre d'EPTZ initialement prédit et effectivement réalisé. Nous identifions comme cause principale un manque d'attractivité du dispositif pour les banques. Celles-ci mettent en oeuvre des stratégies d'évitement qui prospèrent sur une forme de désintérêt des ménages. D'autres causes fréquemment avancées, comme les coûts administratifs ou l'environnement de taux d'intérêt faibles, semblent jouer un rôle moins important. Nous concluons que l'efficacité du dispositif pourrait être améliorée en transférant l'octroi des prêts à une banque publique.

La politique énergétique est au carrefour de trois discours : le discours scientifique lié à la faisabilité technique d'un projet, le discours économique guidé par une analyse coûts-bénéfices dans son acception néoclassique, et le discours politique dépendant de préférences d'un groupe ou d'une société.

This report provides an empirical analysis of personal and corporate tax competition in the European Union.We find that tax competition increasingly takes the form of preferential or narrowly targeted tax regimes on top of general rate cuts. We provide a ranking of the most harmful regimes targeting foreign, primarily highincome or high-wealth individuals. We also discuss several options to address these trends.The evolution of tax competition in the European Union may be summarized as follows. While corporate tax rates are still on a downward trend, the decline of top statutory personal income tax rates has stopped since the financial crisis of 2008–2009. In the meantime, many new preferential regimes have been introduced into the personal income tax systems of member states. Many base-narrowing measures also contribute to lowering corporate tax burdens. By targeting the most mobile parts of the tax base - high-income earners and multinational enterprises - these tax incentives undermine effective revenue collection in the European Union and weaken the horizontal and vertical equity of tax systems.The most striking trend in EU tax competition is the increase in the number of personal income tax schemes targeting foreign individuals. The number of such regimes has increased from 5 in 1995 to 28 today. A tentative ranking suggests that the most harmful ones are the Italian and Greek high-net-worth individual regimes, Cyprus' high-income regime and the pension regimes of Cyprus, Greece and Portugal.These regimes exhibit long periods of duration, provide significant tax advantages, specifically target very high-income individuals or do not require any real economic activity in a given member state. At present, preferential regimes apply to over 200,000 beneficiaries. A lower-bound estimation suggests that the total fiscal costs for the European Union amount to EUR 4.5 billion per year. This sum is equivalent e.g. to the annual budget of the entire Erasmus programme.Member states also apply numerous base-narrowing ...

This paper considers the feasibility of implementing a progressive wealth tax to collect additional government revenue to both reinforce fiscal sustainability in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis and reduce persistent extreme inequality in South Africa. Drawing on our new companion paper, we first identify the tax base and discuss the design of potential tax schedules. Testing alternative tax schedules, we estimate how much additional revenue could be collected from a progressive tax on the top 1% richest South Africans. Our results show that under conservative assumptions, a wealth tax could raise between 70 and 160 billion Rands—1.5% to 3.5% of the South African GDP.We discuss in turn how sensitive our estimates are to assumptions on (1) mismeasurement of wealth and (2) tax avoidance and evasion, based on the most recent tax policy literature. We examine technical issues related to the enforcement of the tax, and how third-party reporting and pre-filled declarations could be used to optimize measurement of taxable wealth and minimize evasion and avoidance opportunities. Finally, we explain how this new tax could interact with other capital related taxes already in place in South Africa, and discuss the potential impact on growth.