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A report by the OECD indicates Ireland had no excess deaths during the pandemic years 2020 to 2022, suggesting many of the thousands who died “with COVID” would have died anyway. The Irish government, notorious for its panicked approach to the coronavirus, targeted its religious citizens for some of its harshest antivirus measures, outlawing going to church for more than a third of the year 2021. Ireland’s ban on in-person religious worship went into effect in late 2020 and endured until May of 2021, despite widespread criticism.

South Korea’s government has been forced to rethink a planned rise in working hours after a backlash from younger people who said the move would destroy their work-life balance and put their health at risk. The government had intended to raise the maximum weekly working time to 69 hours after business groups complained.But protests from the country’s millennials and generation z prompted the president, Yoon Suk-yeol, to order government agencies to reconsider the measure. The plan has also been criticised as out of step with other major economies, including Britain, where dozens of companies last year trialled a four-day week...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and her political allies are indefatigable in their attempt to railroad Congress into agreeing to a global tax deal, and their latest argument is that the pact will be good for U.S. competitiveness. If only that were true. At issue is an agreement last year at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to upend century-old international tax principles. The first prong is a form of excess-profits tax targeted primarily at the largest U.S. tech companies, to be applied in markets where they operate rather than where they are headquartered. The second is a minimum effective...

ransomnote: The Expose is over the target and taking flak, banned and censored - even Paypal turned against them in an effort to deprive them of funding. Please pray that the Expose receive the funds it needs to keep serving the public.A video of a speech made by Klaus Schwab in 2016 at the World Government Summit has surfaced. And it could be his most creepy, sinister yet.The World Government Summit Organisation is a “global, neutral, non-profit organization dedicated to shaping the future of governments,” their website says, and “the only global organisation dedicated to shaping the future of governments...

Update (1310ET): Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe (the current head of the Eurogroup assemblage of EU finance ministers) just issued a terse statement claiming that while Ireland supports the aims of the OECD's tax reform, it's wary of the 15% minimum global tax rate.130 nations, including China & India have signed the 15% global minimum tax plan sponsored by the US and OECD Except Ireland Ireland is smart to defend her advantage over China as a gateway to EuropeI am shocked any African Nation and UK will agree to 15% tax on FDI pic.twitter.com/vDsiea8anC — Kalu Aja (@FinPlanKaluAja1) July 1,...

A top official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is hosting talks on a global corporate tax being pushed by the Biden administration, said a 15 percent minimum rate would be a “very significant step forward” that still leaves countries with enough scope to compete to attract multinationals to their jurisdictions.OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann made the remarks in an interview with Bloomberg on June 7, which followed a landmark agreement on the tax on June 5 among senior officials from the Group of Seven (G-7) countries, which includes the United States. The G-7 countries agreed to...

Following reports that an agreement between the G-7 and the White House on a global minimum corporate tax rate is almost ready, Ireland - which isn't a G-7 member, but is a member of the OECD and the EU, and therefore must also assent to these changes - is speaking out against a new minimum level agreed to by the White House.According to Sky News, Ireland has no plans to increase its 12.5% corporate tax rate, which is already one of the lowest in the developed world, and which has been a tremendous boon for its economy. The latest iteration...

Everyone knows that life isn't fair. One of the best examples of this is tax season. For individuals, it is usually a time of paperwork, worry and paying what is owed. Most taxpayers work in one place and simply file taxes there. For big companies, it is also a time of paperwork and worry. Unlike most people though, companies often work in a number of places, can scramble to move money and profits overseas and look for tax breaks in the hope that they don't owe anything. In many cases, they get away with it. Loopholes have let many US...

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently released its preliminary report on the revenue effects of the first two pillars of its anti-base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) project. The topic may be dense, but the results are not — implementation of the OECD’s plan would result in a $100 billion tax increase on mostly American businesses. The OECD began its BEPS project in 2013 in response to concerns about corporations avoiding taxes with offshore accounts. Since then, it has released a 15-point action plan, encouraging member countries to comply with the points in order to maximize revenue...

France rejects a U.S. proposal this week that would let companies opt out of a proposed international tax reform, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Friday, urging Washington to negotiate in good faith. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin raised serious questions about OECD international tax reform proposals in a letter made public on Wednesday, jarring international officials by floating the idea of a "safe harbor regime". Le Maire said that would mean U.S. companies could opt in or out as they pleased, which he said would be unacceptable to France and other OECD countries. He urged Washington therefore to...

Tuesday, Reuters released the results of a survey of 21 countries which found a majority of people want more taxes on the rich to pay for more welfare: In all of the 21 countries surveyed, more than half of those people polled said they were in favour when asked: “Should the government tax the rich more than they currently do in order to support the poor?” The OECD gave no definition of rich…Support was highest in Portugal and Greece, both emerging from years of economic crisis, at nearly 80 percent compared with an average of 68 percent, the Organisation...

Germany has the second-highest tax burden for single earners among high-income countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Thursday. The news has come amid a large budget surplus in Germany and no plans under the new coalition government to drastically change personal income taxes. […] In its “Taxing Wages” report, the OECD calculated the “net personal average tax rate” (NPATR) to determine a country’s tax burden. The NPATR equals the sum of personal income tax plus social security contributions minus cash benefits as a percentage of gross earnings. Single earners in Germany who have no children...

BADEN-BADEN, Germany — Governments need to do more to create growth that benefits everyone, and the U.S. should spend more on roads, highways, bridges and airports, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Friday. The body, which includes the world's better-off countries, said in a report that governments should focus on providing better access to high-quality education and supporting employment for women through measures like affordable child care. It also highlighted the need for more spending on infrastructure. OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria called for an "upskilling of the workforce" to address worker anxiety about the future of their jobs...

In his speech yesterday, following the Treasury's crack down on corporate tax inversions, Obama blamed "poorly designed" laws for allowing illicit money transfers worldwide. Since the speech came at a time when the entire world is still abuzz with the disclosure from the Panama Papers, Obama touched on that as well: "Tax avoidance is a big, global problem" he said on Tuesday, "a lot of it is legal, but that’s exactly the problem" because a lot of it is also illegal. There is one major problem with that: of all the countries in the world, it is none other than...

Central banks cannot haul economies out of stagnation on their own, the OECD has warned. Catherine Mann, chief economist at the Paris-based think-tank, said countries were now “overloaded on monetary policy” as she described the use of negative interest rates as “a reaction of central banks trying to meet the objective of raising inflation and fostering growth alone”. Ms Mann said banks faced being “squeezed” by the unintended consequences of sub-zero rates in an environment where demand remained subdued. The OECD has repeatedly warned that fiscal policy and structural reforms are needed to ensure recoveries are self-sustaining. “In the economies...

William White, chairman of the Economic and Development Review Committee at the OECD and former chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), says the risks posed by global debt levels are greater today than they were in 2007 and that central banking monetary policy has lost its effectiveness. He also explains the crucial differences between modern macroeconomic modeling and complexity theory (or viewing the economy as a complex adaptive system) and the key lessons this has for policymakers, both fiscal and monetary. Here's a portion of his recent interview with Financial Sense airing Friday on the Newshour page:...

The OECD is out with new global rankings of how students in various countries do in reading , science and math .

When academia, aided and abetted by international agencies, tell you something isn’t happening, there is a very good chance that it is. Take, for example, the assertion by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that immigration has no effect on education. “Only when combined with research methods that can separate causation from correlation are international test scores useful for analyzing education policy outcomes,” the London-based Centre for the Study of Market Reform of Education (CMRE) avers. “For example, PISA would have policy makers believe that immigration has no impact...

EU bosses are pushing to resolve a clash between industry and environmental policy with a new strategy to phase out funding to export coal technology to developing nations, ahead of a meeting of leading economic powers on the issue. The European Commission, the EU executive, urges tougher rules on when subsidies, known as coal export credits, can be used in a paper seen by Reuters, ahead of interim talks this week. Political pressure is growing to reach agreement on restricting the coal subsidies before United Nations climate change talks in Paris at the end of the year. But opposition is...

There is no end in sight for Russia’s economic crisis, as crippling sanctions and tumbling oil prices leave the country staring into an abyss, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has warned. Catherine Mann, the OECD’s chief economist, said Russia was moving closer to shutting itself off from the rest of the world, while the West’s sanctions against Moscow over its annexation of Crimea in Ukraine had left no end in sight for the country’s woes.