Family businesses typically have strong roots in the cities and towns in which they are physically located. As a result, they do not have the ability to optimise their tax payments as cleverly as, for example, large corporations active in the digital industry. At the same time, however, they do suffer the disadvantages caused by the complex rules designed to curb tax competition between countries.
The freedom for labour to provide services across national borders is one of the great achievements of the European Union. But the reality of excruciating regulatory complexity is probably to blame for ultimately preventing a fair number of postings. Especially family businesses are irritated by unnecessary, costly regulations in the countries where their employees are to provide services for a limited period. There is an urgent need for harmonisation and simplification here. This is the conclusion of a comparative study on bureaucratic burdens undertaken on behalf of the Foundation for Family Businesses.
Germany can hardly keep up with the leading business locations in North America, Western Europe and Scandinavia. Germany fails to move forward even as other countries invest in their infrastructure and reform their tax systems. The country’s only clear edge is its relatively low level of government and household debt: As a comparatively solid country, Germany can afford to react to crises. These are the findings of the new country index released by the Foundation for Family Businesses.
German family companies groan under the burden of an EU bureaucracy characterised by inefficiency – owing both to European Union requirements themselves as well as their impractical handling and implementation in Germany.
Are the co-determination rights of German employees protected when a company is converted into a SE? Or must changes be made, as the country’s three-party coalition government has announced? The Foundation for Family Businesses had this question addressed in a new legal opinion written by Professor Christoph Teichmann of the University of Würzburg, an expert for both German and European commercial and company law.
Publicly traded family businesses in Europe do business with a longer-term perspective and more successfully than companies that are not family businesses – and the greater the influence of the founding family, the better their performance. This is the conclusion reached by the study “Listed family firms in Europe” commissioned by the Foundation for Family Businesses and authored by an international research team directed by Marc Steffen Rapp, Professor at the Marburg Center for Institutional Economics of the Philipps-Universität Marburg.
The EU has chosen a procedure for adopting sustainability standards that violates EU treaties. At issue is the planned Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The standards necessary for it actually ought to be discussed between the European Parliament and the European Council, but the task of lawmaking has been delegated to the EU Commission. Even the Commission has laid down only a few core points and is leaving the details to an external organisation – "Efrag", the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group – which is a private consultancy under the influence of interest groups.
The world’s states must move closer together in their trade policies and dismantle trade barriers. This would be the correct response from the European Union to the new geopolitical reality according to the study “European Trade Policy at the Service of Geopolitics?” published by the Foundation for Family Businesses. This study was prepared by Professor Gabriel Felbermayr, the director of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (Wifo).
Family businesses support clear government rules and the social market economy. Particularly in exceptional situations such as the financial market crisis, the coronavirus pandemic and now, in view of a war in Europe, state intervention is necessary. But when does government regulation become dirigisme? Is responsible enterprise possible if economic activity must constantly be measured according to abstract moral categories?
The date was 8 February 1972. The decision by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) was taken in strict secrecy: the SED leadership demanded that the last remaining private and semi-nationalised businesses in the GDR be converted into nationally owned enterprises. The names of the owner families were to be erased and proud traditions extinguished. The purchase price was to be a small sum as compensation.
