Budget
Nothing much to say really - a few quid here and there which will be meaningless after 5% inflation (caused instead of combated by government policy).
Quite significantly - EU states have agreed a major change in VAT. Now, VAT on e-commerce, telecommunication and satellite television services will go to the country where the consumer is, rather than where the service provider is located. Amazon, Paypal, Skype and Apple’s iTunes are based in Luxembourg partly because of their 15% VAT rate (EU minimum on services). Under these new rules, Luxembourg will probably lose EUR 220m per year.
This moves the VAT collected from low-tax economies to enconomies with a large number of customers and/or high tax rates.
This is worrying for Ireland because a similar principle has been suggested by the same commissioner (Laszio Kovacs) and Charlie McCreevy has some out strongly against it. See this article from the Indo.
Luxembourg used it’s veto twice and were granted a delay until 2015 and 30% of VAT until 2018. I would expect Ireland to use it’s veto too but what caused Luxembourg to cave in ultimately? Size?