Bulletin de veille du 30 janvier 2024

Québec/Canada
Historiquement, la couverture médicale pour tous, et pas seulement pour ceux qui n’ont pas les moyens de se l’offrir. La restriction liée aux revenus crée un précédent inquiétant pour une meilleure couverture médicale.
A new commitment to public dental insurance was one of the key parts of the March 2022 Supply and Confidence Agreement between the NDP and Liberal parties. This new form of insurance is unfolding over three distinct phases between 2022 and 2025.
At each phase, the categories of who receives dental care coverage expand to cover more people. However, some of the basic design elements remain the same when it comes to considering who is excluded from this plan. Canada’s new dental care plan only covers Canadians who aren’t insured through an existing private plan or who are poorly covered by a public plan (Appendix 1 provides a discussion of the interaction between existing provincial fill-in-the-gap dental programs and the new federal plan). There are also family income restrictions: if a family makes below $90,000 annually, it gets coverage with co-payments; a family whose income is below $70,000 annually gets coverage without co-payments. All families whose income is over $90,000 a year will be left out of all phases of the new federal plan—even if they aren’t currently covered by a dental insurance.
The choice for what comes next is twofold: (1) Continue to create new medical care programs with a fill-in-the-gaps model and an income cap, like Canada is currently doing on dental care, or (2) Align new medical care programs with the principles of the Canada Health Act, which is based on the underlying principle of health care for all.
The findings in this analysis of Canada’s nascent national dental care plan might also be relevant to the much anticipated announcement of a national pharmacare plan. Income restrictions could leave millions of Canadians out of both plans while a universal program would align with the principles of the Canada Health Act—everyone should be eligible for these programs.
Ce rapport aborde le programme de conversion abordable des subventions pour les contribuables canadiens qui désirent changer du mazout à la thermopompe électrique.
De mars à octobre 2023, le PCAMT a offert aux ménages admissibles une subvention pouvant atteindre 10 000 $ pour le coût d’une thermopompe admissible. Depuis octobre 2023 et jusqu’en mars 2027, le PCAMT amélioré offrira une subvention fédérale allant jusqu’à 15 000 $, des subventions provinciales supplémentaires et une prime unique de 250 $ aux ménages admissibles des provinces ayant conclu une entente de prestation conjointe. Le Programme pour la conversion abordable du mazout à la thermopompe (PCAMT) offre des subventions aux ménages admissibles qui souhaitent passer du mazout à une thermopompe électrique. Pour y avoir droit, le ménage doit être propriétaire de son logement, gagner un revenu égal ou inférieur à la médiane provinciale après impôt et avoir acheté au moins 1 000 litres de mazout au cours des 12 derniers mois. Les appartements des immeubles à logements multiples ne sont pas admissibles.
Ce texte présente la nouvelle disposition que propose le projet de loi C-358 en lien avec la modification de la Loi sur la taxe d’accise au Canada.
Le projet de loi C-358 propose de modifier la Loi sur la taxe d’accise afin d’éliminer la taxe sur les produits et services (TPS) relativement à la tarification du carbone. La loi abolirait la TPS à payer sur : a) les frais, droits ou taxes imposées en application de la Loi sur la tarification de la pollution causée par les gaz à effet de serre, tels que la redevance sur les combustibles et le système de tarification fondé sur le rendement (STFR); b) tout prélèvement provincial imposé relativement au carbone, comme le système de plafonnement et d’échange de droits d’émission au Québec ou la taxe sur le carbone en Colombie-Britannique.
Les contribuables canadiens paieront un total de 81,8 G$ en paiements d’intérêts pour la dette fédérale et provinciale en 2023/24, dont 46,5 G$ uniquement pour les frais de service de la dette.
• In recent years, deficit spending and growing government debt have become a trend for many Canadian governments. Like households, governments are required to pay interest on their debt.
• In aggregate, the provinces and federal government are expected to spend $81.8 billion on interest payments in 2023/24.
• Residents of Newfoundland & Labrador face by far the highest combined federal-provincial interest payments per person ($3,225). Manitoba is the next highest at $2,728 per person.
• The federal government will spend $46.5 billion on debt servicing charges in 2023/24, which is nearly what the government expects to spend on the Canada Health Transfer ($49.4 billion), and significantly more than it expects to spend on childcare benefits ($31.2 billion).
• Combined federal-provincial interest costs in Ontario ($31.5 billion), Quebec ($20.3 billion), and Alberta ($8.6 billion) are nearly as much, or more than, what these provinces will spend on K-12 education in 2023/24.
• Meanwhile, combined federal-provincial interest costs for British Columbians ($9.6 billion) are higher than what the province expects to spend on its social services this year.
États-Unis
La proposition bipartisane vise à donner la priorité à l’augmentation du crédit d’impôt pour enfants pour environ 19 millions d’enfants issus de familles à faibles revenus, représentant une occasion de réduire de manière significative le nombre d’enfants qui vivent dans la pauvreté aux États-Unis.
The bipartisan Child Tax Credit expansion in the tax bill negotiated by Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden and House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith takes an important step toward making the credit work for children in families with low incomes. While smaller than the American Rescue Plan credit expansion that expired at the end of 2021, the proposal’s top priority is getting more of the credit to most of the roughly 19 million children who currently get a partial credit or none at all because their families’ incomes are too low. The bipartisan proposal pairs corporate and small business tax provisions with Child Tax Credit improvements that cost a similar amount, reportedly about $35 billion for each set of proposals. With the exception of a modest indexing proposal, all of the benefits from the Child Tax Credit improvements go to children left out of the full credit because their families’ incomes are too low.
L’attrait des paradis fiscaux est encore un fléau ayant pour effet que la compétitivité des régimes fiscaux est d’une importance capitale. Toutefois, ce document démontre que l’impôt minimum mondial est nécessaire afin de minimiser cet impact et éviter l’immigration des entreprises vers les pays fiscalement avantageux.
Key Findings
- To avoid taxation, American corporations use accounting gimmicks that make profits appear to be earned in foreign jurisdictions which tax corporate profits very lightly or not at all.
- In 2020, American corporations claimed profits in 15 of these jurisdictions that were often far too high to be possible. For example, in four jurisdictions – Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands and Barbados – American corporations claimed profits that dramatically exceeded the jurisdiction’s entire economic output. In the first three of these, the claimed profits are more than five times the size of the jurisdiction’s entire economy.
- Many of these are dependent territories of much larger countries (the U.S., United Kingdom, China, and the Netherlands), indicating that powerful governments are, at best, complicit in arrangements that have allowed corporate tax avoidance to thrive.
- These 15 jurisdictions together accounted for just 3 percent of global economic output outside the U.S. in 2020, yet American corporations reported to the IRS that 59 percent of their total offshore profits were generated in these tiny places. This obviously reflects accounting gimmicks used to escape taxes.
- These jurisdictions have joined most of the world in pledging to end tax avoidance with a global minimum tax negotiated by the Biden administration and other governments. Congress should enact legislation to implement this global minimum tax. Doing so would dramatically reduce or eliminate most of the benefits of claiming profits were earned in such tax havens.
Ce rapport évalue l’essor de l’investissement passif et de l’investissement ESG, examine la réaction contre les votes d’actionnaires de plus en plus agressifs des grandes sociétés de fonds indiciels axés sur l’ESG et propose une autre idée de réforme.
Two recent trends are increasingly reshaping American investing: the rise in passive index investing by institutional asset managers; and the rise in environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) investing led by those same institutional asset managers.
In passive index investing, a mutual fund, exchange-traded fund (ETF), or other institutional investing vehicle buys and sells corporate securities to replicate the holdings of an investing “index” determined by a third party to represent some significant swath of the stock market. For example, the investing vehicle might be attempting to replicate the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 Index, which tracks 500 large corporate stocks that together constitute some 85% of the total U.S. equities market. Because passive investing strategies can offer a broadly diversified “stock market” return at a low investing cost, they have become favored vehicles for long-term buy-and-hold investors, including individuals, pension plans, insurance companies, and endowments.
ESG investing, of more recent provenance, is an offshoot of long-standing “socially responsible investing” that traditionally avoided certain “sin” stocks (e.g., those involving gambling, alcohol, tobacco, or munitions) and/or allocated monies toward industries aligned with investors’ idea of the public good. In addition to these exclusionary and inclusionary investing models, however, many modern ESG-oriented investment vehicles embrace “impact” investing, in which funds holding diversified portfolios seek to change corporate behavior to match investors’ preferred environmental, social, or governance strategies. Proponents of ESG investing argue that it both promotes the public good (at least when oriented around environmental and social causes consistent with the funds’ worldviews) and enhances investing returns (because markets have not properly incorporated the risks of companies’ disfavored environmental or social policies or governance structures).
Ce texte aborde les possibles problèmes liés à l’accord bipartisan sur la fiscalité aux États-Unis.
One concern surrounding the recent congressional bipartisan tax deal is that most of the proposed tax changes are temporary, expiring at the end of 2025. Temporary tax policies deliver no long-term economic benefits and can obscure the long-run cost of a policy when they are eventually extended. The deal also provides retroactive tax relief for 2022 and 2023, which does not change forward-looking economic incentives. Examining the revenue, economic, and distributional effects of a hypothetical deal with permanent tax policy changes shows the longer-run trade-offs policymakers would face. A permanent tax deal would deliver long-run economic growth, raising long-term GDP by 0.6 percent. But policymakers would need additional offsets to ensure the changes do not worsen the budget deficit, as the conventional cost of a permanent deal would range from $696 billion to nearly $1.5 trillion over the 10-year budget window.
International
Le Comité d’étude sur les investissements publics publie son premier rapport : il établit sa vision de ce que sont les investissements publics et apporte un éclairage sur les multiples implications possibles du secteur public ainsi que sur le rôle sociétal, environnemental et économique des investissements publics.
L’arrêté royal du 16 février 2023 a établi le Comité d’étude sur les investissements publics, faisant partie du Conseil supérieur des Finances. Conformément à cet arrêté royal, le Comité a pour mission de constituer et de centraliser l’expertise en matière d’investissement public et d’assister le gouvernement dans l’élaboration de la politique d’investissement public.
L’investissement public est revenu au centre du débat public en Belgique et au sein de l’Union européenne, que ce soit à travers les discussions sur les plans de relance ou sur les transitions climatiques et digitales. Malgré les interprétations variées, plus ou moins larges, de la définition des investissements publics, son rôle dans la vie des citoyens et des entreprises est clé.
Le Comité a comme mission d’élaborer des rapports et avis sur l’évolution, les besoins, la mise en œuvre et l’impact des investissements publics en Belgique, entre autres pour assister les instances politiques dans l’élaboration de la politique d’investissement public. En vue d’établir une base pérenne pour ses futurs travaux, le Comité apporte un éclairage sur la définition de l’investissement public en détaillant les différents types de capitaux (fixe, humain, social, naturel) et les différentes implications possibles du secteur public. Ensuite, le rapport illustre le rôle des investissements publics dans la réalisation des Objectifs de Développement Durable des Nations Unies, couvrant différentes dimensions de la vie en société : sociétale, environnementale et économique.
Une situation qui doit être démentie est celle que les grandes entreprises sont les seules responsables de la croissance économique d’une société, car cela a un impact considérable sur le comportement des investisseurs.
The report highlights that mid-caps are often “hidden growth champions” and key drivers for Europe’s economy. Compared to SMEs and larger companies, mid-caps excel at investment, skill development and labour productivity and they play a vital role in the EU’s economic transitions. However, mid-caps fall short of their potential, as they receive less public support and encounter larger difficulties in access to finance than other types of companies. As a result, mid-caps experience a particularly pronounced investment gap, which hints at larger structural issues in the EU economy, such as the widely known scale-up problem.
Le prochain gouvernement sera probablement confronté à certains des choix économiques et fiscaux les plus difficiles auxquels le Royaume-Uni ait eu à faire face en dehors des pandémies et des crises majeures.
The UK finds itself in an unfortunate economic and fiscal bind. Living standards have endured an unprecedentedly long stagnation. Taxes are at record levels for the UK (though remain low-to-middling by European standards). Public services are showing visible signs of strain and are, in many cases, performing less well than they were in 2010. Further tax rises and further cuts for most public services are built into current plans. But on official forecasts, this is only just enough to stabilise government debt as a fraction of national income.
This will be a thorny inheritance for whoever is in office after this year’s general election. Both Labour and the Conservatives have promised to reduce debt as a fraction of national income. Yet a combination of high debt interest payments and low growth is forecast to make this much more difficult to achieve than in the recent past. In fact, on one measure, it will be more difficult to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio over the next parliament than in any other parliament since the 1950s.
Everything is harder when the economy is growing slowly and the public finances are more constrained. All manner of policy problems will be more difficult to tackle, and all manner of trade-offs will be more acute.
Les auteurs utilisent des données administratives pour la Norvège afin d’estimer un modèle de marché incomplet du cycle de vie des célibataires et des couples à la retraite.
We use administrative data for Norway to estimate an incomplete-market life-cycle model of retired singles and couples with a bequest motive, health-dependent utility, and uncertain longevity and health. We allow the parameters of the bequest utility to differ between households with and without offspring. Our estimates imply a very strong utility of residual wealth (bequest motive), in line with the estimates by Lockwood (2018). The bequest motive accounts for approximately three-quarters of aggregate wealth at age 85. More surprisingly, we estimate similar utility of residual wealth for households with and without offspring. We interpret this as, prima facie, evidence that the utility of residual wealth represents forces beyond an altruistic bequest motive.
L’économie italienne a bien résisté aux crises récentes, mais la croissance est maintenant en train de ralentir. Pour s’assurer une croissance forte et durable à long terme, l’Italie devrait s’attacher en priorité à améliorer l’environnement des entreprises et à stimuler la concurrence, à renforcer ses finances publiques et à promouvoir la transition écologique.
La dette publique, à quelque 140 % du PIB, est la troisième plus élevée de la zone OCDE. Exprimées en pourcentage du PIB, les dépenses publiques liées au coût du vieillissement démographique et à celui du service de la dette devraient augmenter d’environ 4.5 points entre 2023 et 2040. Des réformes de la fiscalité et des dépenses sont nécessaires pour contribuer à placer la dette publique sur une trajectoire plus prudente.
Il faut aussi relancer la hausse de la productivité, qui stagne depuis une décennie, de façon à étayer la croissance à long terme. Les réformes en cours de la justice civile et de l’administration publique contribueront à faire augmenter l’investissement des entreprises et la productivité et à accélérer la mise en œuvre des plans d’investissement public en améliorant l’efficience du système judiciaire. Les obstacles réglementaires à la concurrence dans les services devraient être réduits pour faciliter l’entrée de nouvelles entreprises sur le marché et stimuler la concurrence.
Enfin, il est indispensable de développer l’emploi de façon à ce que la croissance puisse mieux profiter à tous. De fait, en Italie, le taux d’emploi est parmi les plus faibles de la zone OCDE, en raison de l’important chômage des jeunes et du faible taux d’activité des femmes. Renforcer l’enseignement technique et le système de formation permettrait à davantage de jeunes et de personnes vulnérables d’accéder au marché du travail. Il faut accroître le taux d’activité des femmes en élargissant l’accès à des structures publiques d’enseignement préélémentaire. Il serait également utile de promouvoir davantage le congé paternité, notamment en mettant en place un « quota paternel » dans le droit au congé parental commun.
Déductions fiscales disponibles pour les dépenses de R&D en Australie : pour être éligible, l’un des objectifs substantiels est de mener des activités de R&D afin de générer de nouvelles connaissances.
In Australia, Research and Development (R&D) tax incentives have long been regarded as a means to create new knowledge and foster innovation and economic growth. Understanding the range of tax deductions available for R&D and their connection to innovation is crucial for businesses, policymakers, and analysts alike.
Ce rapport aborde la question de l’extrême pauvreté mondiale et propose une réforme mondiale des systèmes fiscaux.
This submission provides written input for the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty’s thematic report on “Eradicating poverty in a post-growth context: preparing for the next Development Goals”. It addresses the need to reform international tax systems to combat poverty and reduce inequalities. It highlights the annual loss of $480 billion in tax revenue due to cross-border corporate tax abuse and offshoring of wealth. It also highlights how low-income countries are disproportionately affected, losing 49% of their public health budgets, while high-income countries lose $433 billion annually. Finally, the article suggests measures related to the newly approved UN tax convention and the implementation of financial transparency and tax justice policies to promote sustainable and inclusive economic development, with a special focus on redistribution and reparation.
Ce rapport met de l’avant le rôle de l’Irlande dans les nombreux abus fiscaux transfrontaliers.
This submission, produced in collaboration with the Government Revenue and Development Estimations initiative at the University of Saint Andrews, highlights the severe human rights impacts caused by Ireland’s continued facilitation of cross-border tax abuse. Produced for the 75th Session of the Committee on Economic, Social Cultural Rights on the Fourth periodic report of the Republic of Ireland, it elucidates the human rights failures embedded in the country’s positioning in international negotiations, particularly with regard to the critically-important UN talks on a framework tax convention. It also calls for Ireland to properly address taxation as part of its forthcoming National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights.
Dans cet article, les auteurs utilisent des microdonnées d’enquêtes historiques pour étudier, pour la première fois, l’accumulation de richesse tout au long de la vie dans les cohortes de naissance américaines au cours des six dernières décennies, ainsi qu’une vision microéconomique de l’évolution de la richesse et de l’épargne globales.
Since the 1980s, rich countries have witnessed an increase in wealth-to-income ratios, wealth inequality, and a boom in asset prices. Yet, little is known about the long-run behavior of these trends in connection to the life-cycle of consecutive generations.
In this paper, Luis Bauluz and Timothy Meyer use historical survey microdata to study, for the first time, the life-cycle wealth accumulation across US birth cohorts over the last six decades, as well as a micro view on the evolution of aggregate wealth and saving.
Key findings:
- They undercover two key new trends: a marked steepening of the life-cycle wealth profile and increased dissaving among older adults.
- Using a theoretical model and wealth accumulation decompositions, they argue that these new trends were driven by the boom in asset prices since the 1980s: valuation gains led to higher life-cycle wealth and allowed households to increase consumption in retirement.
- Looking at aggregates, they find that shifts in the life-cycle wealth profile explain a large share of the increase in the aggregate wealth-income ratio. At the same time, the higher consumption by older adults is the most important force behind the decline in the aggregate saving rate since the mid-1980s.
Dans cet article, l’auteure présente la première série chronologique du ratio des gains par sexe pour les salariés à temps plein en Allemagne depuis les années 1870. Elle examine les facteurs possibles de la dynamique observée et compare la trajectoire allemande avec la référence américaine de la récente lauréate du prix Nobel, Claudia Goldin, et avec le cas suédois.
What are the contexts and factors that enable or hinder gender pay equalization? What pathways have led to greater gender pay equality and where is there still room for action?
In this paper, Theresa Neef provides the first time series of the gender earnings ratio* for full-time employees in Germany since the 1870s. She discusses possible drivers of the observed dynamics, and compares the German path with the U.S. benchmark by the recent Nobel laureate, Claudia Goldin, and the Swedish case.
Key results
- In Germany, the gender earnings ratio has increased substantially from about 44% in the 1870s to about 85% today. The most prominent leap occurred between 1913 and 1937, while the post-war period was characterized by slower progress.
- In Germany, Sweden, and the United States, the interplay between increased women’s education and new work opportunities for women in the expanding white-collar sector fueled pay convergence in the first half of the 20th Yet, in Germany, women’s educational catch-up was slowed due to the dominance of on-the-job vocational training.
- Women’s migration from low-paid agricultural work to higher-paid white-collar jobs was predominantly increasing the German gender pay ratio in the first decades of the 20th
- The post-war period brought diverging developments between Germany, Sweden, and the United States as a result of different economic conditions and policy action.
Équipe de rédaction
Recherche et sélection des articles :
- Léa Béliveau
- Pierre-Alexandre Bernier
- Gabrielle Gosselin
- Anne-Sophie Paquet
Coordination et édition :
- Tommy Gagné-Dubé