The Role of Government. Taxation. Business Ethics

The role of government. Taxation. Business ethics

For the past two or three decades, determining the role of the government in business cycle has perhaps been the central political and economic issue in industrial democracies. Although the number of nationalized industries is steadily declining in most parts of the world, people with left-wing views still generally believe that the government has an essential role to play in providing the economic infrastructure (public transport, telecommunications, and so on) and ensuring the provision of services such as education, health care, social security and perhaps housing, and regulating working conditions, health and safety standards, and so on. People with right-wing views, on the contrary, generally argue that many (or most, or maybe all) of these activities can be left to private enterprise and the market system, and that the role of the government should perhaps be restricted to activities such as defense, the police, and the justice system. They argue that too much regulation is bad for business, and leads to inefficiency.

Foe example if we look at the role of the Department of Trade and Industry which is under the jurisdiction of the British government, we’ll see the following picture. The key areas of DTA involvement are developing of trade, investments and export, developing of industry inside the UK, and regulating or ensuring open, competing markets, mergers and monopoly policy. And the main focus of DTI’s work at the moment is to provide detailed analysis of the markets, the priority markets that Britain is aiming fir, for service of industry, and then help, particularly for the small and medium sized companies, to tackle those markets in an efficient way. The specific help is that each priority market, there are 80 of them around the world, have a desk officer who’s wholly responsible for providing information about that country, detailed economic and political description of the market, sector...