SESMI

A variety of collaborative economy business models are rapidly emerging and growing across the world, calling for changes in traditional tax policies. Although the collaborative economy shows a rapid growth, the review of the existing taxation practices within the collaborative economy reveals inefficiency, associated mainly with the blurred boundaries among professional and non-professional service providers, with the avoidance to cooperate from collaborative platforms and with the fragmentation in taxation regimes among EU member states and worldwide. The aim of this paper is to investigate tax challenges arising from the collaborative economy and to offer a comprehensive model of the tax system development in the collaborative economy. Accordingly, this paper demonstrates the results of systematization of the collected task-oriented data and the description of the proposed model developed by the generalisation approach. Data collection and systematization methods have been used. The authors conclude that the taxation of the collaborative economy must be investigated on the global level by using collaborative economy instruments (platforms and scoring). The role of awareness of both service providers and tax administrations is stressed in the discussion part.

Until recently a common practice to combat undeclared employment in Latvia was to provide wide inspections in risk economic sections. New knowledge about the motivation of undeclared employment motivation has raised considerable concerns about the quality of the existing practices. The goal of this study is to investigate the prevalence and motivation of the undeclared employment in Latvia in order to accept/confirm or to deny/reject these concerns. This paper delivers the results of qualitative analysis of the survey that authors undertook. The results show that the current definition of undeclared employment in Latvia cannot be considered as fully supported by society, because the perception of the need to declare employment differs significantly depending on the employment regularity and the relationship with the employer. The authors found that the results obtained in the study on the prevalence of undeclared income do not differ significantly from the results obtained in the pr...

There are significant losses in tax revenues across the European Union (EU). National governments lose billions of euros in the revenues from non-paid taxes and other illegal activities. The fight against aggressive tax planning, tax fraud and illegal activities is on the agenda of the EU, OECD and all the national governments. However, due to the size of tax losses it should not be treated just as tax evasion, but rather as tax terrorism! Therefore, the author has set criteria when tax evasion should be named as “tax terrorism” as well as designed the principles for tackling tax terrorism and other ways of non-payment of taxes. The tax evasion could be treated as “tax terrorism” in case of international evasion from taxes by organized groups of persons for criminal purposes as well as when it creates significant losses in government revenues. The term “tax terrorism” would have impact to communication and cause response of society and politics, therefore it would have more social a...

The purpose of this work is to create a unified algorithm for public-use railway infrastructure charging. The proposal to base infrastructure charging on a three component system, where the basic price is calculated according to a uniform methodology based on full cost recovery has been worked out. Further, the basic price should be differentiated in accordance with deviations from the equality principle defined in this work as factual and legal differences caused by rail infrastructure users on security, technical compliance, environmental protection, optimal network working, as well as transport policy provided by state officials.

This study is aimed at the examination of rail infrastructure state funding, its pre-conditions, the assessment of its needs and factors that can impact its amount and forms. Mainly, the Latvian railway case was examined; however, it was found that in the all Baltic States the state funding for rail infrastructure should cover subsequences of internal failures and external regulations of the rail market and its amount depends on state facility to adopt political programs to internal market terms.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Until recently a common practice to combat undeclared employment in Latvia was to provide wide inspections in risk economic sections. New knowledge about the motivation of undeclared employment motivation has raised considerable concerns about the quality of the existing practices. The goal of this study is to investigate the prevalence and motivation of the undeclared employment in Latvia in order to accept/confirm or to deny/reject these concerns. This paper delivers the results of qualitative analysis of the survey that authors undertook. The results show that the current definition of undeclared employment in Latvia cannot be considered as fully supported by society, because the perception of the need to declare employment differs significantly depending on the employment regularity and the relationship with the employer. The authors found that the results obtained in the study on the prevalence of undeclared income do not differ significantly from the results obtained in the pr...

A variety of collaborative economy business models are rapidly emerging and growing across the world, calling for changes in traditional tax policies. Although the collaborative economy shows a rapid growth, the review of the existing taxation practices within the collaborative economy reveals inefficiency, associated mainly with the blurred boundaries among professional and non-professional service providers, with the avoidance to cooperate from collaborative platforms and with the fragmentation in taxation regimes among EU member states and worldwide. The aim of this paper is to investigate tax challenges arising from the collaborative economy and to offer a comprehensive model of the tax system development in the collaborative economy. Accordingly, this paper demonstrates the results of systematization of the collected task-oriented data and the description of the proposed model developed by the generalisation approach. Data collection and systematization methods have been used. The authors conclude that the taxation of the collaborative economy must be investigated on the global level by using collaborative economy instruments (platforms and scoring). The role of awareness of both service providers and tax administrations is stressed in the discussion part.

Article 32 (1) of Directive 2012/34/EU provides that in order to obtain full recovery of the costs incurred by the infrastructure manager (IM) a Member State may, if the market can bear this (MCB), levy mark-ups on the basis of efficient, transparent and non-discriminatory principles, while guaranteeing optimal competitiveness of rail market segments. The charging system shall respect the productivity increases achieved by railway undertakings (RUs). The main implementation problem is a question how to evaluate the MCB level, the productivity increases achieved by RUs and optimal competitiveness in an efficient, transparent and non-discriminatory way if: 1) the meanings of the included concepts are unclear for natural monopoly; 2) there are mutual contradictions among these concepts, for instance, obligation to which can pay at least the cost that is directly a commercial advantage to give priority to the most productive RU when capacity is limited; and 3) it is impossible to make u...

This study is aimed at the examination of rail infrastructure state funding, its preconditions , the assessment of its needs and factors that can impact its amount and forms. Mainly, the Latvian railway case was examined; however, it was found that in the all Baltic States the state funding for rail infrastructure should cover subsequences of internal failures and external regulations of the rail market and its amount depends on state facility to adopt political programs to internal market terms.

The EU sets ambitious climate and energy goals for 2030, or so-called European Green Deal, in compliance with the new global framework for sustainable development adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 25, 2015. The Green Deal is accompanied by legislative acts ensuring that both public and private funding depend significantly on the sustainability of economic activity. The definition and classification of sustainable activities are embedded in the EU Taxonomy Regulation. The purpose of this study is to find out how the stakeholders of railway sector perceive, react to, and feel about the Green Deal policy measures and approaches. After investigation of the relevant literature and compiling a structured questionnaire, persons involved in the operation of the railway sector (railway transport policy makers; railway undertakers and railway infrastructure managers) were convened and a focus group was conducted. This article describes the results of the focus group and identifies future directions for design thinking research on market responses to government interventions in supply chain operations.

The EU sets ambitious climate and energy goals for 2030, or the socalled European Green Deal, in compliance with the new global framework for sustainable development adopted by the UN General Assembly on 25 September 2015. The Green Deal is accompanied by legislative acts ensuring that both public and private funding depend significantly on the sustainability of economic activity. The definition and classification of sustainable activities are embedded in the EU Taxonomy Regulation. The aim of the present study is to find out how the stakeholders of railway sector perceive, react to, and feel about the Green Deal policy measures and approaches. After investigation of the relevant literature and compiling a structured questionnaire, persons involved in the operation of the railway sector (railway transport policy makers; railway undertakers and railway infrastructure managers) were convened and a focus group was conducted. The article describes the results of the focus group and iden...

Transfer pricing (TP) is based on many principles-the essential one is the Arm´s Length Principle (ALP). In this respect, the term "associated persons" is of crucial importance: associated persons must be involved in transactions in order for the ALP to be applied. The aim of the paper is to contribute to existing comparative analysis of TP rules-specifically, to provide a critical analysis of the term "associated persons" as prescribed by domestic law in Brazil, the Czech Republic, and Latvia. The key goals of the research conducted were to provide a comprehensive picture of the variety of definitions, to indicate relationships between international law and domestic law, and last, but not least, to highlight various concepts of the term "associated persons" and to identify problematic aspects connected with the interpretation of the definitions and the applications of the related rules. The study, which is based on qualitative research, is exploratory and interpretative in its nature. Its results present a background for further research and point to the fragmentation of law on TP with respect to the investigated issue. On the basis of the results of the comparative study one can conclude significant differences among, and fragmentation in, the definitions of the term "associated persons" both in respect of the number of categories established and in respect of the absence of the autonomy of the definitions of the term "associated persons" as provided by public law (especially by income tax acts). At the same time one can conclude the same position regarding the application of double tax treaties in all the countries for which the study was carried out.

Making the observation of export incomes in the Balances of Payment (BoP) of the Baltic States it was observed that there was no coherency between trends of rail and sea transport service income level. This study was aimed at the examination of this phenomenon in order to understand what causes service income level differences and if it influences the competitiveness of transit corridors of the Baltic States. A combination of statistical methods for data processing was used: grouping, extension and graphical representation as well as trend analysis. It was concluded that total seaport-rail charge level in international transportation has an increasing trend, where rail service charge level rises faster than that in maritime service. Incoherence and duplication of processes, inelastic charge regulation as well as uneven capacity usage affect the competitiveness of the observed transport corridors and are not compensated by market mechanism and, therefore, should be taken into account when developing strategies for improving transit corridor competitiveness.