In its contemporary history, which can be considered having started in 1945, Japan has achieved the remarkable performance of having most of the time recorded trade surpluses. This result is all the more impressive that it has been mainly driven by exports of goods, almost constantly on the rise since the Japanese economic take-off in the 1950-1960s, despite limited local availability of raw materials and, after 1980, a stagnant population.

In a context of lack of confidence, depressed investment and aggregate demand as well as deflation risks, all of these phenomena occurring despite a conjunction of favourable factors (cheap oil, weaker euro and very accommodative monetary policy), we propose to take up the proposal of the European Commission to revise the Energy Taxation Directive, introduced in 2011 and withdrawn last year due to the opposition of the Parliament and the Council.

At least since the birth of modern capitalism in eighteenth-century Europe, competition has been recognized by many economists and other theoreticians of ethics and social sciences as an essential driver of progress. Either applied to trade, politics or science, competition, they claimed, stimulates innovation and confronts products, services, parties or ideas on a marketplace that rewards the best and sanctions the worst, alike a permanent race where spectators are also expected to be voters, as it should be the case in liberal democracies.

During the summer 1989, a few months before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and with it, of an ideology and a geopolitical scheme that had structured the world for almost half a century, Francis Fukuyama argued in his famous essay “The End of History?” that we may have reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”, that is “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

In the famous Parable of the Talents, the master awards his servants who managed to multiply wealth and punishes the one who preferred to hide the treasure and made a sterile use of it. The story ends on a harsh judgment: “for to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 25:14–30).

Illicit financial flows are one of the symptoms of unharnessed globalisation. While trade and finance have become more and more international, with an accelerated rhythm since the end of the Cold War, governance has not kept pace and all states, including the most powerful, face the consequences of non-cooperative behavior and free ride, from other state entities as well as from non-state actors whose influence can exceed that of entire countries.