Airlines for Europe (A4E) and executives from its member airlines have called for the abolition of passenger taxes to drive growth and jobs in Europe.
Since its launch in January A4E has addressed the issue of new and rising aviation taxes in Europe, as one of its key policy priorities. Instead of preventing economic growth and job creation by imposing unreasonable taxes, European governments should create a supportive regulatory environment.
“By weakening an enabler of economic activity, governments are shooting themselves in the foot: they only see the short term budgetary gains but ignore the larger and long-term impact on economic activity. By removing passenger taxes governments would end up as net beneficiaries due to the increased revenues from VAT and other taxes, as well as higher passenger numbers,” said Thomas Reynaert, Managing Director of A4E.
“As an economics professor before being a politician, I believe that what is important for airlines, like any other business, is to have full transparency and predictability on taxation decisions at Member States level. I ask the European Commission to publicly list these taxes and levies and to examine their economic impact. The EU should be much more active in the coordination of Member States tax policies,” said Ramon Tremosa i Balcells, Member of the European Parliament from Barcelona.
A4A claims that experience and economic analysis both show that removing taxes is beneficial, e.g. the Dutch government’s removal of its ticket tax in 2009 led to strong growth in passengers; the Irish government’s removal of traffic tax in April 2014 led to extensive traffic growth at Irish airports and an 8% increase in tourism last year while the number of Northern Ireland residents flying from Dublin increased by 52% in the first year; economic analysis by PwC shows removing UK Air Passenger Duty (APD) would boost British GDP by 1.7% and create 60,000 new jobs by 2020.