Professor Frank Barry:

Sometimes, unilateral actions are beneficial if we are a step ahead of the game. Nothing springs to mind in terms of what we can do to generate extra tax revenues, which is the Deputy's point, without possibly suffering detrimental long-term consequences. As I told Deputy Doherty, our corporation tax revenues as a share of national income are higher than the average for the OECD and the EU. This may have changed over the course of the recession, but it was the case for a decade or more before the crisis. We are not losing out in terms of corporation tax revenues. We are gaining substantially in terms of jobs, spill-over effects and so on. There is no silver bullet item that I can point to as a change that we should be considering. Whatever changes have possible short-term benefits, we must worry about the long-term costs.