Unification of gift and inheritance taxes and the protection of taxpayers – the inheritors and recipients of donations

Gift and inheritance tax in the European Union Member States is calculated and charged in numerous ways. In the majority of countries of the European Economic Community it constitutes a separate tax. In several countries it is not charged at all or is part of the income tax. Despite the attempts made by the European Commission to unify the legislation of the Member States in this regard, there has been no success. The article presents the above-mentioned attempts of the European Commission, their results and consequences. It identifies the methods of avoiding a double or even triple taxation on cross-border inheritances or donations. This is of crucial significance also to the Polish citizens who demonstrate higher and higher investment activity in the countries of the European Economic Community and third countries.

16. The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions:

This chapter investigates the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) and the Committee of the Regions (CoR), two bodies established in 1957 and 1992, respectively. Both Committees are consultative; their rationale is to provide expertise to EU legislators and to represent functional respectively territorial interests. These organs share a number of similarities with regard to their legal basis and policymaking influence. Both have pursued diverse activities beyond their official mandates in a quest to find their own identities and exercise voice in the EU system. This chapter analyses these committees with regard to their development, membership, and activities, illustrating how both embraced timely topics and seek to involve themselves in the larger debate on the future of Europe. Thereby, they contribute to the EU’s development as a complex, multilevel, and multichannel democracy.

Human papillomavirus vaccination in the European Union/European Economic Area and globally: a moral dilemma

While many European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) countries recently expanded human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination to boys, HPV vaccine supply is currently limited for girls in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) that are severely affected by HPV. Globally, about 50% of countries have introduced HPV vaccination. Some LMIC with high burden of cervical cancer have not yet introduced HPV vaccination, or are reaching suboptimal vaccination coverage. While WHO issued a call for cervical cancer elimination in 2018, a global shortage of HPV vaccines is currently predicted to last at least until 2024. We reviewed national policies of EU/EEA countries and recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on immunisation to discuss current challenges and dose-sparing options. Several EU/EEA countries have extended HPV vaccination to boys and the European Cancer Organisation has issued a resolution for elimination of all HPV-associated cancers in both sexes. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control concluded in its 2020 guidance that cost-effectiveness of extending routine vaccination to boys depends on several context-specific factors. The extension of HPV vaccination to boys in EU/EEA countries may affect global availability of vaccines. Temporary dose-sparing options could be considered during the COVID-19 post-pandemic period.

Assessing the optimality of euro adoption in Romania through shock correlations

The present paper is concerned with the prospect of euro adoption in Romania. The study starts from the relevant literature of the Optimum Currency Areas and identifies the most widely acknowledged meta property and methodological model for this purpose: the SVAR Blanchard and Quah decomposition for identifying the supply and demand shocks. Employing the indicated model and the most recent data, we are able extract and analyse the underlying shocks that hit 34 European economic entities in the period 1995-2019, while also taking into account two crucial structural changes for the Romanian economy – central bank independence and EU accession. After performing the pairwise correlations between Romania and the rest of the economic entities for both the supply and demand disturbances, we map them on a bidimensional graph. We discover that while there is relevant integration and connectedness that ensures relatively high correlations between supply shocks, the politically-motivated monetary and fiscal policy disturbances that created ample and hectic demand side movements, are a factor of great concern for the prospect of single currency adoption in this Eastern European country. The findings support the view that there is room for the conduct of macro policies to become more supportive to the process of euro adoption and that the respect of convergence criteria would help in this respect. To our knowledge, this is the first study performing pairwise shock correlations between Romania and many other European economic entities, while also isolating the effect of post 2005 structural changes.