Matthias Bauer

In the context of the proposal to establish an EU investment screening framework and the ongoing negotiations of the EU-China investment agreement, ECIPE in cooperation with the Mechanical Engineering Industry Association (VDMA) organised a discussion with stakeholders on the threats and opportunities of Chinese investments in European technology and European investments in China in September 2018. This bulletin is based on stakeholder opinions expressed during...

Online platforms create “more perfect” markets. Online platforms are a market-driven cure to the imperfections of the EU’s incomplete Single Market. Platforms provide well-functioning technical infrastructures that allow users to easily deal with country-specific legislation in the EU, e.g. VAT and invoicing requirements, consumer protection laws, sector-specific licenses and the particularities of national contract law. Modern online platforms have...

The European Commission has recently proposed to upend decades of international tax cooperation and introduce a new three percent tax on corporate turnover from digital advertising and online intermediation services. The proposal is not just remarkable for the actual design of the tax; it is equally notable that the digital services tax is proposed without any supporting evidence that it is in EU Member States’ economic and fiscal interest to tax digital business...

Some (large) EU governments are making the case for digital companies to pay “their fair share of tax”. The key underlying assumption is that companies in the digital space are not doing so right now. Governments also assume that there is a substantial source of untaxed profits that is waiting for the embrace of the taxman. The European Commission is now considering “revenue taxes” on those companies that under some definition can be called...