Local Taxes… the issue with EU is the taxes and cost of labour.
Its evident that labor cost and taxes are not excessive in EU by the reality of existence of plenty of businesses in a healthy society.
What doesn't exist in EU is the "tech" business, and the tech doesn't have margins too slim to employ people and pay taxes. On the contrary, the margins are fat. The reason that the tech sector isn't a large one in EU is that its easy to incorporate in USA and access the full EU market from there instead of incorporating in some small EU country and deal with their bureaucracy and internal border limitations. The 28th regime and the EU-INC is to address exactly that.
If the USA-EU relations deteriorate enough, it will also create instant trillion Euros market. Just look at the quarterly reports of US tech giants, they generate EU revenues that are not that behind the US revenues. For Apple thats %60 of the US revenue, or ~110B$ for the last quarter and that's happening despite Apple having a much smaller market share in EU.
A full blown conflict between US-EU will be a huge opportunity to replicate the US tech sector in EU and having an EU-INC will be the necessary facilitator that is currently missing when compared with the landscape in USA.
There is no such thing as slave labor in the tech sector. Some countries offer a lower barrier to entry than others. The EU has a very high barrier to entry when it comes to taxation.
You can believe what you want, but I think every country's goal is to reduce taxation as much as possible for companies and for people. Unfortunately, the current in the EU is to keep raising them and give state more and more monopoly on services.
Most of the Europeans trust the government more that they trust the businesses and demand some services to be provided by the government and they all collect taxes accordingly. Some countries like Bulgaria have relatively small governments and do %10 flat tax for companies and individuals and other countries like France or Germany provide robust government services and safety net and do much higher taxation.
(see Apple Ireland)
> Dying out, pyramid scheme retirement system mostly.
The solution to this is more creampies 20 years ago, no government action can change that. Every generation pays for the retirement of the previous one and if a generation makes less kids then they put higher burden on those kids. Before the taxes and pensions people used to look after their aging parents, today people who live in cities and pay taxes so that they can have independent lives from their parents. That's how biology works, people born procreate age and die and if you live in a society the young ones take care of the old onces until they die.
Usually, high taxes go hand in hand with high quality welfare state. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of business ppl are educated and understand the added value of an accessible publicly funded healthcare, pension and education system.
Commonly listed (and perennial business problems) are: unstable political environment (in the sense that tax law changes every four years, complex legal system, so long term planning is impossible), corruption (meaning you have to know who to bribe to get the job done), crime rates and lack of infrastructure.
450 million and counting people would still prefer to live and work in the EU than anywhere else.
Even more so with present geopolitics, to put it politely !
majority of population of any given country doesn't emigrate ever, even inside EU where it would be extremely easy
Its also factual that there's a large scale migration intra-EU, with people from poorer countries moving to rich ones to seek jobs. Bulgaria, Romania and Poland are prime examples for that.
Its also well documented that those same people stop migrating and even coming back once their counties level up with the rest of the EU, again Poland and Bulgaria are good examples for this in the last years.
EU is trying to make sure that the poorer countries receive the help they need to catch up and it looks like its working.
If you go to the CNN website there are lots of articles on there right now (e.g. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/us-woman-moved-to-germany) about US peeps who have emigrated to Europe recently and are thoroughly enjoying their new life with no plans to return to the motherland in the foreseeable future.
I can't possibly think why. ;)
Because unlike the US, we don't speak the same language. If there would have been a real push to have a common EU language since its inception, we would have been more mobile and more US like. But no...
The majority of Europeans, and especially those of recent generations speak incredibly good English.
Most Europeans speak 2–3 languages anyway, so there is always a common language to be found. No need for one to be forced on you.
There's a big difference between being a tourist in Europe and actually living here.
But honestly, I'm not sure what the problem is. As previously mentioned by other people on this discussion, vast swathes of Eastern Europeans live and work in the West and have had no trouble whatsoever picking up the local language. As they say, the best way to learn a language is by immersion.
Most Europeans will have gone to a school where they typically learnt a minimum of one extra language and often two extra languages.
With the exception of Finnish, the majority of Western European languages are not that difficult. Its not like Chinese or Japanese which are simply impenetrable unless you went to school there or you are super-smart and managed to pick it up in later life through sheer brain power.
That is why english as secondary official language would be beneficial.
Besides a fractured market with lots of different bureaucracies to deal with, the lack of at-will employment is a big labor cost when you need to be able to quickly spin up or spin down operations.
Welfare should always be a responsibility of the government, not businesses. Let businesses business and let government redistribute wealth.
Having said that, the lack of proper integration is a huge problem, like imposing tarrifs of over 100% on ourselves.
In the US, this provides the companies with the levers they need to maintain a functioning business in pretty much an instant. In the EU you can't do that.
The US hire-and-fire approach is then the other extreme.
The optimal amount of worker protection is somewhere in-between.
The government should be providing protection, by way of providing education and welfare to support reallocation of labor, and taxing businesses to do it. Requiring each business to do it and then policing them is far less efficient for all parties.