Álvaro Rodríguez Bereijo - La Constitución fiscal de España - Centro de Estudios políticos y constitucionales Madrid, 2015, 359 pages

• Author: Jacques Malherbe
• Pages: 223-225

Studi Tributari Europei 1/201 7

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Álvaro Rodríguez Bereijo - La Constitución fiscal de España –

Centro de Estudios políticos y constitucionales

Madrid, 2015, 359 pages*

Jacques Malherbe1

Professor Rodríguez Bereijo, president emeritus of the Spanish

Constitutional Court, deals, in the calm of its residence in Galicia, with the

essential questions of Constitutional Tax Law. The spanish constitution is

one of the most recent modern constitutions (1978). It includes articles that

can be qualified as economic constitution or also as financial or fiscal

constitution. If it recognizes the right to private property and to

entrepreneurial freedom, to freedom of establishment and to free

movement of goods and persons, it subjects every form of wealth to the

general interest and declares, within article 1, that Spain is a welfare and

democratic State. As it is written, in 1978 all parliamentarians were

keynésiens. These principles were imposed to the central State as well as to

the autonomous communities. As long as the latter ones are concerned, a

principle of inter-territoriality was explicitly provided (art. 158).

Is the Constitution neutral in terms of political organization ? For someone,

belonging to minorities, article 38 would be aligned with both a liberal

economic system and an interventionist or planned economy. Article 31,

which interests tax experts, provides that «all taxpayers contribute to the

public expenses by virtue of their ability to pay according to a fair tax

system which is inspired to the equality principle and progressivity principle,

without in any case producing a confiscation effect». And it adds: «public

expenses will realize an equitable attribution of public resources and their

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* How to quote this article: J. MALHERBE, Álvaro Rodríguez Bereijo - La Constitución fiscal de

España – Centro de Estudios políticos y constitucionales Madrid, 2015, 359 pages, translated

by ALESSIA Fiedelangeli, University of Bologna, in Studi Tributari Europei, n. 1/2017

(ste.unibo.it), pp 223-225, DOI:!10.6092/issn.2036-3583/8783.

1 Jacques Malherbe, Emeritus Professor at the University of Louvain, Belgio !