Share How people live, work, travel, consume and communicate have changed in extraordinary ways since 1900. Designed objects help us understand these changes and prompt us to ask questions about the past, present and future.
A robot as my colleague?
The first decades of the 20th century saw vast changes in how goods were manufactured. The introduction of the first moving assembly line at Ford Motors in 1913 dramatically altered the way things were made. Mechanised production had a direct impact on workers, with more repetitive work on the one hand and incentives like higher wages and the first paid holidays on the other. How things were designed also shifted. Simpler shapes and fewer decorative features made manufacturing more efficient, as is the case with the
How can Amazon pay no tax while enjoying record pandemic revenues? Europe Letter: Web of subsidiaries makes question hard to answer, which is the point
Wed, May 5, 2021, 21:00
How is it possible for a company to report record revenues of €43.8 billion, but a loss of €1.2 billion that means it does not have to pay any tax?
This is the question that regulators, politicians and tax investigators are asking after Amazon’s main European unit filed the striking results for its 2020 year, which was overall a record-breaking success for the company globally as the pandemic fuelled a shift to online shopping.
A complex web of international subsidiaries makes it difficult to answer.
The paltry amount Amazon pays in corporation tax could be wiped out by Rishi Sunak’s new ‘super deduction’, campaigners said yesterday.
Amazon’s British sales soared 51 per cent to £19.4billion last year. Its warehousing arm, Amazon UK Services, paid £6.3million in tax in 2019 despite raking in £3billion in sales.
But campaigners say the firm could eliminate its tax liability altogether.
The super deduction lets firms slash tax bills by 25p for every £1 spent on new equipment. George Turner, of the campaign group TaxWatch, said it would be lucrative for firms such as Amazon whose sales surged in the pandemic.