K22 - Business and Securities LawReturn

The EU ten years long strategy, Europe 2020, is coming up to its final assessment, including the interplay of both the competition and consumer protection in the internal single market. The pivotal legislative instrument in this respect, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (“UCPD”), was enacted even before Europe 2020 and was supposed to lead to a full harmonization of the protection against unfair business-to-consumer commercial practices, regardless whether misleading or aggressive, by the year 2007. The judiciary answer whether this has been achieved and supports the EU is to be learned from the competent court - Court of Justice of EU. A deep research is performed to provide data for a holistic Meta-Analysis which comparatively and critically assesses this strong, but not yet fully settled, case law consisting of almost 100 UCPD cases, and to expose it to the legislative wording, official EU statements and academic press. The key hypothesis suggests that the study of this case law in the light of the legislative wording, along with the official opinions of the EU and academic literature, provides valuable insights and suggestions about the status quo of achievements of the UCPD and Europe 2020 as well as the commitment of the EU and the attitude of the ultimate stakeholders, Europeans.

The objective of this contribution is to assess the development and the current state of the tax burden in the Czech Republic as a significant factor of the growing competition among the individual European Union countries, concentrating on the statutory and implicit corporate income tax rates. Comparison of the implicit tax rates across the individual countries provides indications whether substantially different tax approaches exist to companies with identical characteristics, but dislocated in different countries.