Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

There was a good degree of commentary on the international perspective; there were a couple of notable contributions on it recently. The basic point is that we are always talking about diversifying the tax base, so it is a notable contribution in that regard. Second, as a small open economy, we are always focused on the issue of competitiveness and we have to be. We must be very careful with what we do with things like labour tax and tax on capital because we can see investment flow out of the economy as quickly as it comes in. That is why the site value tax has an appeal, in the sense that it is essentially taxing an unproductive asset in terms of land. We are not going to see a reduction in the amount of land available because of this, whereas if we target other areas, such as labour or capital taxes, it could have an adverse outcome.