Reducing taxation on labour, while ensuring budget neutrality by shifting it towards consumption taxes, recurrent taxes on immovable property and environmental taxes can help correcting market inefficiencies and lay foundations for a sustained rates of growth and job creation.The efficiency of the tax system can be enhanced by broadening tax bases, such as removing or reducing the use and generosity of exemptions and preferential regimes, and by strengthening the tax administration, simplifying the tax system, and combatting tax fraud ...[+++] and aggressive tax planning.

Among the most important in this regard are a sufficient supply of highly qualified human resources, a strong public research base, a dynamic entrepreneurship culture, adequate systems of intellectual property rights, a competitive environment with research and innovation-friendly regulations and competition rules, supportive financial markets, macro-economic stability and favourable fiscal conditions.

Improving the quality of public expenditure and placing greater emphasis on the efficiency of public administrations and making tax systems more growth-friendly, including by further shifting the tax burden from labour to tax bases linked to consumption, property and pollution, will play an increasingly important role in safeguarding and shaping the future of the European growth and social models.

19. Calls for urgent action to be taken by the Commission to fight tax fraud and tax evasion; calls for a tax system that is simple and transparent; calls on the Member States to reach an agreement on the proposal on a common consolidated corporate tax basis as an important instrument in that fight, and believes that its position of 19 April 2012 on the proposal for a Council Directive on a common consolidated corporate tax base (CCCTB) shall serve as a basis for a reasonable compromise; reiterates its call on the Member States to shift taxes from labour; notes that the measures to fight tax fraud and tax evasion should not undermine ...[+++] the prerogatives of the Member States; welcomes, however, effective cooperation on tax arrangements at European level;

As regards the Commission's argument that the scope for public authorities to adjust refunds seems to point to discretionary treatment of economic operators that goes beyond the simple management of tax revenue by reference to objective criteria, which, in the Court of Justice's view, may mean that the individual application of a general measure takes on the features of a selective measure , the French authorities underline that a general measure covering all producers was introduced starting in the 2009-2010 marketing year in view of the end of the milk quota system and that the refund threshold of 1 % or 2 % is not discriminatory, because it applies to all milk producers on the basis ...[+++] of the quantity in excess of the individual quota, which de facto means a reduction of the tax applied.

3. Recalls that the establishment of a VAT system based on the ‘origin principle’, which implies that transactions between Member States liable to VAT would bear the tax charged in the country of origin instead of being zero-rated, remains a long-term solution for combating tax fraud effectively; notes that the ‘origin principle’ would make it unnecessary to exempt goods traded in the internal market from VAT and to tax them subsequently in the country of destination; recalls that in order to be operational, a VAT system based on the ‘origin principle’ requires tax approximation between countries to avoid tax competition, as well as th ...[+++]e establishment of a clearing system, as originally proposed by the Commission in 1987;