Language tax

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The language tax is an economic concept proposed by the Belgian economist Philippe Van Parijs.[1] It is intended to compensate countries with a less widespread language for their expenses for teaching and translation.

Van Parijs points out that Jonathan Pool had proposed this kind of taxation in 1991 but criticizes Pool's proposal to distribute the cost of language learning on a per capita basis.

An analogous concept is found in the work of the Swiss economist François Grin,[2] who argues that such countries are implicitly paying an impôt linguistique (literally also meaning "language tax") to countries with a "strong" language. In a similar sense, the Italian Radicals party speaks of a tassa inglese[3] ("English tax").

See also[]

  • Economics of language

References[]

  1. ^ Van Parijs, Philippe. "Europe's three language problems". In Multilingualism in Law and Politics. Archived 9 May 2006 at the Wayback Machine.
  2. ^ Grin, François Grin. "L'enseignement des langues étrangères comme politique publique" (in French).[dead link].
  3. ^ "I costi della tassa "inglese" (in Italian). 21 October 2005. Archived 10 March 2007 at the Wayback Machine.
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