Word: finlandized
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...risen sharply over the past 30 years and are now among the highest in the world. Adding together corporate, personal, social security and value-added tax (VAT), the highest-taxing countries in the world are in Western Europe: France, Belgium, Austria, Italy and the four Scandinavian countries - Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway. (Germany and Britain are further down the list, but still ahead of the U.S., Japan, Canada, Mexico and Australia.) This week, a French antitax group is taking out newspaper ads to celebrate "the day of tax liberation." Given the nation's tax burden, it calculates that the French...
...major E.U. nations by about 0.5% - or more than double the impact of a similar-sized reduction in income tax or corporate taxes. But the idea faces stiff opposition. Better Budgets Jon Blondal says it's no coincidence that nations currently running budget surpluses, such as Canada, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden and Australia, also happen to be the ones that have modernized and reformed their budgets. "The process is key," says Blöndal, an Icelander who regularly confers with treasury officials from around the world in his role as a budget expert at the O.E.C.D. in Paris. What does...
...allowed the government to cut spending by about 11% without most people noticing - except within ministries and agencies. He adds: "All of Europe is now taking steps in this direction." In Canada the government fixes its initial budget number according to economic growth estimates by private-sector forecasters. In Finland, under a freedom of information act, the internal budget submissions from departments to the Finance Ministry are public. The fear of being publicly shamed is a powerful incentive not to put in exaggerated demands. "We're pretty satisfied how the money is spent," says Teemu Lehtinen, who heads Finland...
...first country to institute legislation granting registered same-sex partners the same rights as married couples. Adoption, artificial insemination and church weddings were not part of the deal, though by 1999, couples could adopt each other's children. Norway, Sweden and Iceland all enacted similar legislation in 1996, and Finland followed suit six years later. In 2001, Germany enacted a law that allows same-sex couples to register for "life partnerships," but a second act - promising equality on taxes, pensions and child custody - was rejected. Since 1999, France has granted cohabiting couples a form of legal partnership that (after...
...anti-virus company Symantec claims that by yesterday afternoon, over 10,000 computers worldwide were infected by Sasser. But many computer service websites placed the estimate closer to 100,000 machines. Companies in Finland, Taiwan, Australia and the United States were initially hardest-hit by the virus...