Market economies inevitably come with economic inequality. However, economic inequality today depends not only on the current generation, but on pre-existing economic inequality inherited from earlier ones. Inequality persists across generations, and this is a challenge for society for several reasons. First, because of fairness: what family we are born into is a lottery; our starting conditions, which condition our life outcomes, are thus beyond our control. Second, because of efficiency: adverse conditions early on can prevent individuals from contributing to society according to their potential and from attaining high levels of well-being. Hence, a crucial question is how to reward the merits of the current generation, which results in greater societal welfare, without allowing them to condition the development of subsequent ones.

According to the European Green Deal, achieving a decarbonized, prosperous, fair and inclusive European economy by 2050 requires urgently tackling a complex equation encompassing not only economic and environmental challenges, but also social aspects. This entails a strong commitment to ensuring access to clean, affordable and safe energy for all Europeans. Yet millions of European households cannot afford essential energy services needed to guarantee a healthy standard of living. In fact, in 2022, 9.3% of the European population reported being unable to keep their homes adequately warm, a 35% increase from the year before. A series of measures must thus be taken to reverse this situation.

Mobility, i.e., the ability of taxpayers to relocate for tax purposes (Slemrod, 2010), is a challenge for current tax systems. It concerns both the real or artificial mobility of (the profits of) companies, in part facilitated by digitization, and the mobility of the labor factor. While IEB Report 3/2021 dealt with the first type of mobility, this one deals with the second. To this end, it includes three complementary contributions, especially in terms of the geographical scope of each one.

If you read sports newspapers and commentary, you could be forgiven for believing that major sporting events are always a great idea for the organising city and country, that it is obviously necessary to fire the manager when a team is underperforming, or that the team that shoots first in a penalty shoot-out has it made.

The burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas emits gases into the atmosphere that act like the glass roof of a greenhouse, trapping the sun’s heat and preventing it from escaping into space, thereby increasing the temperature of the planet. This warming of the Earth is causing the climate to change in ways that constitute a serious threat, due to the negative natural, social and territorial consequences that it may generate.

In 2013, we published an IEB Report on tax reform with the subtitle “We Have Outgrown the Garage and it Needs Clearing Out” – an analogy used by Lawrence Summers in reference to the evolution of tax systems. Nearly 10 years later, the garage has once again filled with clutter. Since the last spring cleaning, two reports on reforms to the Spanish tax system have been published: the so-called Lagares Report (2014) and now the White Paper on Tax Reform (2022), the latter being nearly twice as long as the former. The greater length of the 2022 white paper comes down to the fact that, in addition to providing a quantitative diagnosis of Spain’s public finances, it also addresses a number of other issues, including the serious environmental problems we are currently facing, the energy crisis, the digitalisation of the economy, and rising income and wealth inequality.