Financial Taxes and the Sand in the Wheels of Financialization:Legal Challenges for the EU Directive Implementing Enhanced Cooperation in the Area of Financial Transaction Tax

One of the many results of the Global Financial Crisis was the insight that the financial sector is under-taxed compared to other industries. In light of the huge bailouts and continued subsidies for financial institutions that are characterized as too-big-to-fail demands came on the agenda to make finance pay for the mega-crisis it caused. The most prominent examples of such taxes are a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) and a Financial Activities Tax (FAT). Possible effects of such taxes on the economic constitution and increasingly in particular on the European Single Market have been discussed controversially over the last decades already. Especially with the decision of eleven EU member states to adapt an FTT using the enhanced cooperation procedure a number of additional legal challenges for implementing such a tax have emerged. This paper analyzes how tax measures of indirectly regulating the financial industry differ, what legal challenges they pose, and what their overall contribution would be in making the financial system more stable and resilient. It also analyzes the legal arguments against enhanced cooperation in this area and the legal issues related to the British lawsuit against the Commission’s Directive proposal in the European Court of Justice on grounds of the extra-territoriality application of tax. The paper concludes that the feasibility of an FTT is legally sound and given the FTT’s advantages over a FAT the EU Directive should be implemented as a first step for a European-wide FTT. However, significant uncertainties about its implementation remain at this stage.

A 'ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry': Joyce's Orientalism in the Context of 11 September 2001 and 1922

Chapters 3 and 15 of Joyce's Ulysses exhibit glimpses of three dreams, fantasies and eventual nightmares linked to the figure of 'Haroun al Raschid.' Historically speaking, the latter was a powerful Caliph of Baghdad, a medieval potentate about whom many of the most memorable of The Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights' Entertainments were once and then again spun as tales of pleasure. Joyce seizes upon the figure of 'Haroun al Raschid' as a fictive measure to articulate the 'orientalist' fantasies of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. However, this evocative figure of Near Eastern history, of fabulous narrative and the progressively converging fantasies of two modern European literary characters is riddled with paradox. Such material provides Joyce a perceptive and proleptic sense of the paradoxes and brutal historical contradictions through which Western and Eastern dreams of theocratic nationalism, ethnic zealotry, colonial rebellion and Zionism are to be played out. W. B. Yeats' poem 'The Gift of Harun al-Raschid', written in 1923, the year after the book publication of Ulysses, provides both a fitting foil and a significant socio-historical point of reference for Joyce's own figurative use of the Caliph of Baghdad.

Time Out of Time: Derrida, Cixous, Improvisation

This article considers the paradox of improvisation as a gift out of time, which is completely in tune with time, subject to time. It does so through an alignment of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy and the poetic writings of Hélène Cixous. Ever mindful of the possible impossibility of improvisation in Derrida’s work, improvisation here is given over to Cixous, to the side of life, and is theorised as a type of ‘feminine writing’, as an inventive strategy that calls forth the unknown other and dreams of a gift in life that is out of time.

Long-term return reversals-Value and growth or tax? UK evidence

This paper examines (i) whether value-growth characteristics have more power than past performance in predicting return reversals; and (ii) whether typical rational behaviour such as incentives to delay paying capital gain taxes can better explain long-term reversals than past performance. We find that value-growth characteristics generally provide better explanations for long-term stock returns than past performance. The evidence also shows that winners identified by capital gains dominate past performance winners in predicting reversals in the cross-sectional comparison. However, in the time-series analysis, when returns on capital gain winners are adjusted by the Fama and French (1996) risk factors, the predictive power of capital gain winners disappears. Our results show that capital gain winners are heavily featured as growth stocks. Return reversals in capital gain winners potentially reflect market price corrections for growth stocks. We conclude that investors’ incentives to delay paying capital gain taxes cannot fully rationalise long-term reversals in the UK market. Our results also imply that the long-term return pattern potentially reflects a mixture of investor rational and irrational behaviour.

An Analytical Study of Surplus Value using a Value Driven Design Methodology

People are now becoming more environmentally aware and as a consequence of this, industries such as the aviation industry are striving to design more environmentally friendly products. To achieve this, the current design methodologies must be modified to ensure these issues are considered from product conception through to disposal. This paper discusses the environmental problems in relation to the aviation industry and highlights some logic for making the change from the traditional Systems Engineering approach to the recent design paradigm known as Value Driven Design. Preliminary studies have been undertaken to aid in the understanding of this methodology and the existing surplus value objective function. The main results from the work demonstrate that surplus value works well bringing disparate issues such as manufacture and green taxes together to aid decision making. Further, to date studies on surplus value have used simple sensitivity analysis, but deeper consideration shows non-linear interactions between some of the variables and further work will be needed to fully account for complex issues such as environmental impact and taxes.

Climate Change Mitigation and Intergenerational Justice

Existing climate change mitigation policies are particularly concerned with the reconciliation of two seemingly conflicting aims: environmental protection and economic efficiency. The normative principles underlying these policies meanwhile focus on two central ideas: fair burden-sharing and agents' responsibility. However, both existing policy instruments and their supporting philosophical principles are highly problematic in terms of intergenerational justice and truly effective climate change mitigation. Three competing conceptions for allocating and distributing the burdens of climate change mitigation (cap-and-trade schemes, carbon emission taxes, and personal ecological space quotas) and their compatibility with principles of intra- and intergenerational justice are analysed and evaluated. None of the proposed instruments is able to satisfy the demands of effective mitigation and egalitarian justice on its own, which suggests that existing proposals for the distribution of emission rights and climate change-related costs need to be supported by a thicker account of intergenerational justice.

Do Gifts Increase Consent to Home-based HIV Testing? A Difference-in-differences Study in Rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Background Despite the importance of HIV testing for controlling the HIV epidemic, testing rates remain low. Efforts to scale-up testing coverage and frequency in hard-to-reach and at-risk populations commonly focus on home-based HIV testing. This study evaluates the effect of a gift (a food voucher for families, worth US$ 5) on consent rates for home-based HIV testing.
Methods We use data on 18,478 men and women who participated in the 2009 and 2010 population-based HIV surveillance carried out by the Wellcome Trust Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Our quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach controls for unobserved confounding in estimating the causal effect of the intervention on HIV testing consent rates.
Results Allocation of the gift to a family in 2010 increased the probability of family members consenting to test in 2010 by 25 percentage points (95% CI 21-30; p<0.001). The intervention effect persisted, slightly attenuated, in the year following the intervention (2011), further increasing intervention value for money.
Conclusions In HIV hyperendemic settings a gift can be highly effective at increasing consent rates for home-based HIV testing. Given the importance of HIV testing for treatment uptake and individual health, as well as for HIV treatment-and-prevention strategies and for monitoring the population impact of the HIV response, gifts should be considered as a supportive intervention for HIV testing initiatives where consent rates have been low.