'Golden Passport' programmes not only make the EU vulnerable for money laundering, tax evasion and corruption, but also create false incentives from a welfare economics perspective,  Kai A. Konrad, Director at the MPI for Tax Law and Public Finance and Ray Rees, emeritus Professor of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, argue on VoxEU.or, the policy portal of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

Small EU states regularly sell 'golden passports' to high net worth individuals, and these citizens thus earn the right to live and work anywhere in the EU. By imagining member states as private clubs and the EU as a 'meta-club', their column presents a model of the effects of this activity. While selling golden passports may be seen as an informal transfer to poorer states, the number of citizenship granted will always be larger than is optimal for the EU as a whole.

Read the article here:

https://voxeu.org/article/citizenship-trade-inside-eu-sovereignty-rights-need-be-realigned

April 2020