Schumpeter

DEATH may be certain in Italy, but taxes are another matter: an estimated €285 billion remained unpaid last year, about 18% of GDP. Yet this will change if a new way of assessing income, called redditometro, is a success. The system, which became law on January 4^th, aims to winkle out many of the large number of Italians who cheat on their annual income tax returns.

Continue reading "Big government meets big data" »

MARGARET THATCHER said that you cannot buck the market. But if the experience of India’s government over the last few months is anything to go by, you can charm the pants off it. My e-mail inbox is overflowing with missives from the finance ministry that promise a bounce in the economy, assert a step change in investor sentiment, deny there is a bad debt problem in the banking system and promise a stable tax regime.

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GOOGLE dodged a particularly large legal bullet on January 3rd, when America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the results of a long-running investigation into allegations that the internet behemoth has been abusing its dominant position in online search to promote its own businesses at the expense of rivals. Google’s competitors had hoped the FTC would put a stop to this practice—which they have dubbed “search bias”—a move that would have put a big dent in the web firm’s commercial prospects. But in the event, the commission found no evidence that Google was stifling competition in this way.

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THERE are an estimated 120,000 microfinance initiatives worldwide but Thailand’s “Village and Urban Revolving Fund” lends more money to more people than any other. The scheme’s outstanding loan portfolio totalled $4.9 billion in 2011; the number of active borrowers that year stood at 8.5m. Those numbers are swelling. Yingluck Shinawatra, the Thai prime minister (pictured above), announced plans late last year to inject $2.6 billion in additional capital into a network of nearly 80,000 village banks, which her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was prime minister between 2001 and 2006, created with a stroke of a pen ten years ago.

Continue reading "The biggest microlender of them all" »

AS the crisis moves from an acute phase to a chronic one, we ask what the pace of recovery will be in 2013

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FOR any who doubted whether there was honour among thieves, or indeed among investment bankers, solace may be found in the details of a settlement between UBS, a Swiss bank, and regulators around the world over a vast and troubling conspiracy by some of its employees to rig LIBOR and EURIBOR, key market interest rates.

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JEFF BEZOS founded Amazon in 1994. Apostolos Apostolakis and his mates started e-shop.gr, Greece’s biggest online retailer, just four years later. The comparisons end there. The Seattle juggernaut’s annual sales grow at double-digit rates; e-shop’s have been savaged by Greece’s depression. Amazon made its name selling books. E-shop was stymied by regulated book prices and shifted early into electronics. The Americans have indulgent shareholders while the Greeks were nearly undone by skimpy equity.

Economic woes aside, Greece is tough terrain for online shopping. Less than half of Greeks are regular internet users compared with two-thirds of Europeans overall.

Continue reading "The right side of the Styx?" »