Malta, Germany, Belgium, Spain, France and Italy, are the only countries in the ERU where taxes on companies are more than 33 per cent, a recent study has showed.

Ten years ago, 17 of the 25 countries now in the EU, had such high levels of company taxes. Over the current year, company taxes have decreased by one per cent across all countries in the EU. If the current trend continues, average company taxes will fall from the average 26 per cent today to 12 per cent by 2020 and to zero per cent by 2032.

Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, joint director of CEPII, and professor at the University of Nanterre, wrote in Telos-eu Agence intellectuelle, that France seems to have resisted most to this decreasing trend: its company taxes have risen over the past 10 years and only now have decreased to 33.3 per cent, which is less than 1996’s 36.7 per cent with the difference however that while the latter was competitive, the former is decidedly not.