LUXEMBOURG

Electoral law presents no restrictions in party registration. Party lists, complete or partial, are made up for each of the four electoral districts by political parties or groups of candidates. The lists are introduced, either by 100 voters registered in the district or by an elected MP from the district (whether an incumbent or about to leave office), or by three communal councilors elected by the district.
The lists can be as small as a single individual; this creates the possibility of small, ad hoc, single-issue parties. During the most recent elections for example, an “Association of Divorced Men” which had announced its participation eventually made an alliance with the Alternative Democratic Reform Party (Alternativ Demokratesch Reformpartei, ADR), which was itself founded as single-issue party seeking equal pension rights for all.

All newspapers are closely tied to political parties and tend to be partisan, especially during election campaigns. This situation is to the advantage of the larger political parties, especially the CSV, which can count on the support of a newspaper empire that is also close to the Catholic Church, which plays an almost hegemonic role in print media. As there are no public broadcasters in Luxembourg to counterbalance this influence, the one private broadcaster assumes this role. During election campaigns, the government provides the political party lists with airtime and the opportunity to broadcast television ads on a more or less equal footing with each other. Under the government’s oversight, roundtable discussions with candidates from all the lists are organized.
The financing of election campaigns, particularly the distribution of promotional leaflets by post, is granted by law, although this guarantees minimal electoral success.

To take part in elections one must be a citizen of Luxembourg who is 18 years old or older on the day of the elections, who claims full civil and political rights and who lives in the country. Luxembourgers living abroad temporarily can vote by mail. Hence, there is no observable discrimination.
However, 44% of the resident population is excluded from national elections because they are not citizens of Luxembourg. Of those, 70% are citizens of the European Union and can therefore participate in European elections. All foreigners, EU citizens as well as non-EU citizens, have the right to participate in local elections provided they fulfill certain residency requirements and are registered on the electoral list.
The political participation of foreigners at the local level has improved. Voting list enrollment has recently been facilitated and in April 2010, a proposal was introduced to allow foreigners to stand as candidates for the positions of mayor and councilor. Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker has, however, exercised his veto against allowing foreigners to vote in parliamentary elections.

Party financing was clarified by the law of December 21, 2007 (into force as of January 1, 2008), which introduces public funding of routine party activities, rules on transparency and monitoring, and penalties for breaches of regulation. The Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) applauded the law’s introduction, while noting that some gaps in regulation persist: “…in so far as insufficient account was taken of the financing of election campaigns and of candidates for election. Because the law breaks such new ground, the impact of the improvements in the area of transparency, monitoring (by the Court of Auditors) and sanctions still need to be determined; at least on paper, there are some lacunae.”
The GRECO Evaluation Team (GET) complained about the lack of a uniform assessment of various services and benefits in kind, such as the assistance of allied media during the election campaign and demanded a system of “effective, proportionate and dissuasive penalties” for those who break the law. The GET criticized that despite the new law, parties still have no specific legal status. The major finding of the evaluation was the lack of public control of the parties’ accounts, as the parties experience difficulties in setting up an accounting system.
Pointing to the need for a fully coherent monitoring system of political funding, the GET recommends that “a clear separation be made between the financing of parliamentary groups and that of political parties or that the Court of Auditors’ jurisdiction be extended to parliamentary groups.”

The media market is small and a pluralistic market is only possible thanks to generous press subsidies. One might allege that the subsidies are an indirect way of influencing the media, but in general the independence of the media is respected by the government and the rules for granting subsidies are transparent and unanimously accepted.

Luxembourg’s six daily newspapers are more or less closely controlled by political parties. There is a marked imbalance of influence among these papers, which generally reflects the strength of their political sponsors. The leading newspaper, “Luxemburger Wort,” is owned by the Archbishop and is close to the Christian Social People’s Party (CSV). It has a circulation of roughly 80,000, which is a large number considering Luxembourg’s total population of one-half million; the paper’s circulation is alone larger than the combined circulation of its competitors.
The media landscape since 2007 has been shaken up by the release of two free daily newspapers. The audience share of the “Luxemburger Wort” fell to 43%, while that of “L’Essentiel,” its free competitor, is 27%, with an even higher proportion of readers among 15- to 49- year-olds. Among this target market the free paper exceeds the coverage of the historic leader, “Luxemburger Wort,” thus in effect counterbalancing the influence of the CSV.
In television and radio, the station RTL clearly dominates. RTL has had no real competitors in television and it remains well ahead of its radio competitors, despite the liberalization of the market launched in the early 1990s. Its audience share is 4.5 times that of DNR, a station which has close ties to the CSV.
As competition has increased since the last review period, media pluralism is ensured.

As the absence of a freedom of information act has remained an issue, the program of the 2009 government promises a “new law inspired on the principles adopted by the laws of our neighbors and recommendations of the Council of Europe.” Meanwhile, the most effective way to obtain information from the government is the so-called parliamentary query; the government is required to provide an answer within a month or even within a week, in case of urgency. The most recent statistics for the parliamentary session 2007-2008 include 859 questions submitted, generally involving more technical or circumstantial issues, but sometimes involving sensitive matters.
General information is easily obtained from the government website, which centralizes access to ministries and communication between official agencies and citizens.

Civil rights are effectively protected in Luxembourg and all state institutions respect these rights. There are still some shortcomings. Same-sex marriages have not been awarded the same rights as traditional marriages. Data retention was extended to email communication in 2010.
There are four institutions in charge of protecting civil rights: the Constitutional Court, an advisory board on human rights, the National Commission on Data Protection and a parliamentary ombudsman. However, the judiciary system’s overload and subsequently slow case processing has triggered concerns over due process and equitable treatment. The European Court of Justice has reprimanded the country on several occasions in recent years as a result of delays in the court system.

No infringements of the right to speak, think, assemble, organize, worship or petition have been reported during the period under review.
Rather marginal anticlerical forces demand the separation of church and state and criticize the state’s subsidies for churches, particularly the Catholic Church, which is dominant in Luxembourg. They denounce the offer of Catholic religious education in public schools. As a reaction to this pressure, the 2009 government program promises the creation of so-called houses of secularism, following the Belgian model.

Obvious cases of discrimination are very rarely reported as Luxembourg public culture traditionally condemns manifestations of xenophobia. In contrast, until very recently, institutional protections against discrimination were very weak and Luxembourg was condemned by the European Court for non-implementation of various directives in this area. Meanwhile the EU Directive on equal treatment between men and women (76/207/CE and 2002/73/CE) was adopted in the law of May 13, 2008.
The EU Directive on equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin (2000/43/CE) had already been adopted by a law of November 28, 2006 and led to the creation of the Center for Equal Treatment (CET) in 2008. Its purpose is to promote, analyze and monitor equal treatment between all persons without discrimination on the basis of race, ethnic origin, gender, sexual orientation, religion or beliefs, disability or age, but its activity has almost exclusively focused on awareness-raising campaigns.
The activity of the CET has been very modest and awareness of it is not widespread, as shown by a survey it commissioned itself, in which only 1% of the respondents indicated the CET among institutions fighting against discrimination.

Luxembourg has a long-standing tradition of being a lawful state. Nevertheless, citizens are too often confronted with judicial vagueness or even a lack of legal guidance. Luxembourg’s administrative culture is based on pragmatism and common sense rather than judicial subtleties. This means that many matters cannot be decided with reference to well-known or established rules. Administrative decisions are sometimes arrived at in a decidedly ad hoc manner. Still, most people accept this method of operation for government and administrative matters, trusting that the legal flexibility in any given situation may result in a compromise favoring their own interests.
Courts are overloaded and take far too long to settle cases brought before them. The government has only recently begun to address this problem by hiring more judges. Since the creation of independent administrative courts and a constitutional court 10 years ago, the number of pending cases has dramatically increased, which clearly underscores the government and its administrative office’s lack of respect for legal regulations.

The existence of an administrative jurisdiction and the Constitutional Court guarantees an independent review of executive and administrative acts. The Administrative Court and the Administrative Court of Appeals are very busy. The annual report covering the period from September 2007 to September 2008 includes 945 judgments at the Administrative Court and 377 judgments at Administrative Court of Appeals, indicating that judicial review is actively pursued in Luxembourg.

The Constitutional Court is composed of nine members, all professional judges. They are appointed by the grand duke on the recommendation of the members of the Superior Court of Justice and the Administrative Court of Appeals, who gather in a joint meeting convened by the president of the Superior Court of Justice. These two jurisdictions are appointed by the grand duke on the recommendation of the court itself, so their recruitment is co-opted. This principle is enshrined in Article 90 of the constitution and has never been questioned. It gives a great degree of independence to the Constitutional Court as well as to the Superior Court of Justice and the Administrative Court of Appeals.

No corruption scandal was revealed during the period under review. Experts consider Luxembourg a country with a very low level of corruption. Parliament, political parties and civil servants are considered very reliable. Problems however can be found within the private sector and business.
Luxembourg’s Court of Auditors still lacks formal institutionalized controls. So it is less formal audit mechanisms but social control that prevents corruption in this very small country. Indeed, these mechanisms seem to work rather well, except for some instances of nepotism. However, the lack of institutional controls is detrimental to the overall cause of corruption prevention.

Luxembourg’s prosperity is based on the multinational companies that have established themselves in the country. Contrary to the caricatured image of the country drawn by competitors, the reasons for this cannot be reduced simply to banking secrecy and low taxes. Luxembourg has a competitive business environment, a strategic location in the heart in Europe, a knowledge-based innovative economy, a stable business climate and skilled workforce and, in addition to purely economic aspects, a welcoming society and low crime rates. (1)
All economic actors are aware of these details, and it is the underlying reason and very explanation of the consensual Luxembourg model embodied in the Tripartite Coordination Committee. Apart from the shortfalls and slowness in administration matters, the overall result is successful, as measured by GDP per capita or the many competitiveness rankings where Luxembourg continues to hold top positions. The Competitiveness Observatory within the Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade keeps track of these rankings, which are used as arguments during business development and prospecting missions. At these occasions, officials like to emphasize Goldman Sachs’s “Growth Environment Scores” where Luxembourg was ranked number one among 170 competitors in 2005. (2)
The business community prefers the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) of the World Economic Forum, which ranks Luxembourg at 21 out of 133 (GCI 2009-2010) and identifies the most problematic factors for doing business in the country: restrictive labor regulations; an inadequately educated workforce; difficult access to financing; an inefficient government bureaucracy; and an inadequate supply of infrastructure. (3)
April 2010 faced the breakdown of concertation within the framework of the Tripartite conference. This body failed to agree on any of the adjustment measures proposed by the government. Trade unions and employees’ associations have pushed alternate strategies to address the economic crisis. The government has not yet been able to provide a strategy that could be agreed by all social partners.

Even if unemployment has increased considerably in the past few years, despite the economic crisis unemployment numbers have seemed to have leveled off in recent months. The official, seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stood at 5.9% in February 2010 and still remains low when compared to other European countries. Job security is also relatively high as Luxembourg remains – thanks to a labor law that is very strict on this point – the country with the highest rate of permanent employment contracts in the European Union (95%).
As Luxembourg’s economy far exceeds its demographic resources – native and immigrant alike – it is largely dependent on a non-resident workforce, the so-called transborder commuters. Since summer 2009, the total number of people in the workforce has stabilized after more than two decades of rapid growth. This has led to a decline in the relative proportion of transborder commuters in the workforce.
In the current atypical situation of manpower shortage, achieving full employment remains one of the stated goals of the government. It aims to achieve this through a series of proactive measures: to reform the public employment agency; to press companies to first attempt to fill vacancies from within the national labor market through the public employment agency; to create subsidies for job creation, particularly if said jobs benefit young unskilled workers, older people (50+) or women wanting to re-enter the workforce after starting a family. These actions however only have had a very limited impact on more general sources of unemployment. These include the serious shortage of highly skilled labor, or more generally speaking, the inadequacy of educational qualifications with the requirements of the labor market. The very generous unemployment and social security benefits, as well as a high guaranteed minimum wage, lead to a high reservation wage level.

The breakdown of the corporate concertation in April 2010 also included the failure of the strategy of Jeannot Krecké, minister of economic affairs. Krecké wanted to achieve a “roadmap” toward the reestablishment of competiveness with 65 proposals. The minister and employees complained that Luxembourg suffered a 27% decline in labor unit costs during the period from 1998 to 2009 vis-à-vis Germany, according to Eurostat figures.
On the other hand Luxembourg’s enterprise policy offers very little room for maneuvering due to the country’s small size and its lack of industrial diversification. As Luxembourg’s economy relies very strongly on the financial sector (responsible for 45% of GDP, including indirect contributions by service providers) (1), the great challenge for enterprise policy is the fostering of diversification through a two-way strategy. This includes, first, custom-tailored investment and R&D incentives for local business and, second, attracting new business worldwide.
Founded in 2008, “Luxembourg for Business” operates as a trade promotion agency to foster the country’s outbound economic activities. In recent years, a dozen companies in the communication and media sector have gained a foothold in Luxembourg. E-business is also promoted as a new economic niche; several large international information and communications technology (ICT) companies have locations in Luxembourg. (2 )
Other sectors are promoted with varying degrees of success. One of these is logistics. Luxembourg airport represents the fifth largest air cargo hub in Europe, and a road/railway piggyback service operates between Luxembourg and the French/Spanish border. Another is the automotive sector, where around one-fifth of activity is said to be devoted to research and development. This includes, inter alia, the multinational tire manufacturer Goodyear, DELPHI (which concentrates on the design, development and testing of components related to energy and engine management systems) and IEE (producing sensing products). An emerging sector, biomedicine, includes three projects being undertaken in collaboration with the University of Luxembourg and renowned international partners: a bio-bank, a systems biology center and a cooperative research project to validate markers for lung cancer.

Two laws of December 19, 2008 increased the attractiveness of Luxembourg: capital duty was abolished from January 1, 2009 and the corporate tax rate was further reduced. “Paying Taxes 2010,” a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Bank Group, measures the ease of paying taxes across 183 economies worldwide, by assessing both the cost of taxes and the administrative burden of tax compliance. Luxembourg ranks at 15 in the list. The total tax rate as a percentage of commercial profits is 20.9%, far below that of other European countries.
Since 2001, the distribution of the tax burden between households and business changed much to the disadvantage of households, whose share increased from 56% in 2001 to 64% in 2009.
This is nevertheless accepted, because the general tax burden for private income is relatively low. (Income tax rates are progressive with a limit at 38%, but due to significant reduction, the tax burden is low overall. For instance, a couple with two children and an income of +/- €35,000 pays no tax; the fortune tax was abolished in 2006; savings are taxed at a reduced flat rate of 10%; premiums paid into extra-legal pension funds are counterbalanced by tax relief measures; and VAT on the acquisition of real estate is greatly reduced.)
Two innovative measures in recent years deserve to be mentioned. First, the tax benefits of married couples have been expanded to hetero- and homosexual couples living under a “civil solidarity pact” partnership (Pacte civil de solidarité, PACS). Second, child allowance on income tax has been replaced by a tax bonus, so that parents who pay little or no taxes at all can profit from this advantage.
So the criteria of sufficient revenues are not met at an absolute level, but relatively well as compared to other states. The level of competitiveness however is controversial among experts.

According to the Maastricht criteria, Luxembourg is a model budgetary student. Despite a counter-cyclical spending program, the country’s budget deficit in 2009 remained at 1% of GDP under the Maastricht formula, compared to 3.2% in Germany, 5.9% in Belgium and 8.2% in France. In 2008 Luxembourg had a debt of 13.5% of GDP, at the lower end of EU countries. In addition, its net debt, resulting from its debt minus investments in companies (i.e., Arcelor-Mittal, SES and BNP-Paribas) and reserves, for example pension and employment funds, lies below zero.
The government has presented a stability and growth program that will lower the public sector deficit to zero by 2014. This would be possible through annual savings of around €400 million. This measure, which trade unions have characterized as representing unnecessary and exaggerated austerity, will be one of the most controversial topics of the Tripartite.
However, budgetary policy is not really sustainable as the budget balance is too dependent on the use of regulatory niches. This can be illustrated by a recent change in VAT regulation within the European Union. On December 4, 2007, the Council of the European Union reached a political agreement on changing the rules on VAT so as to ensure that VAT on services accrues to the country where consumption occurs, rather than where the supplier is located. For e-commerce, or more precisely for business-to-consumer supplies of services, this will only start on January 1, 2015, with a four-year transitional phase in which taxes will be shared by both the country of the supplier and of the consumer.
As the VAT revenues of e-commerce are equivalent to about 1% of GDP, the loss of revenue will be considerable. But furthermore, to avoid job cut-backs the government has some 10 years to persuade enterprises attracted by the possibility of applying the lowest possible VAT rates that there exists other reasons to stay in Luxembourg (e.g., state-of-the-art IT infrastructure, good broadband connectivity and skilled labor).

The public health system in Luxembourg is very efficient, as confirmed by the Euro Health Consumer Index (EHCI). In 2009 Luxembourg fell four places in this index because of failures in the field of e-health, namely e-transfer of medical data between professionals. The country still remains eighth in the classification of 33 states. Luxembourg also ranks first in the new European ranking of conditions for people living with HIV (Euro HIV Index).
There recently has been a major reform of public health insurance funds. The funds organized by professional bodies for historical reasons have been brought together to form one single administration.
Because of the permanent growth of the workforce, the age distribution of the insured is very favorable in Luxembourg and, in recent years the health insurance fund has not encountered the same funding problems as experienced in other countries. Only in 2009 did a small deficit appear. This deficit is expected to grow rapidly in 2010, and for this reason a recovery plan is under discussion, with the presentation of a bill expected on April 23, 2010. Two of the key measures of this bill should be a better balancing of the infrastructure between hospitals to avoid doubling-up, especially for expensive equipment, and the introduction of the so-called primary care physician model (Hausarztmodell), with a family doctor as gatekeeper to coordinate medical services and avoid duplication of treatment.

Social cohesion is seen as a pillar of competitiveness in Luxembourg, as it ensures social stability. It has been an explicit goal of successive governments and has been encapsulated in many social laws: a minimum salary for wage earners, uniform in all the sectors of the economy; a guaranteed minimum income subject to certain conditions (minimum age, period of residence in Luxembourg, etc.); and other social allowances such as child benefits and a minimum pension.

Despite the increase in unemployment and the scarcity of affordable housing, the latter of which is seen as a major problem especially for young families, Luxembourg’s society still appears very egalitarian, in comparative terms.

Childcare has significantly improved over recent years in terms of provision and quality. In 2004, the state and municipalities secured the care of 7,481 children. In 2008, this number increased to 23,000, and it is predicted to further increase by more than a third to respond to the demand created by a new original measure to promote equal opportunities for children living in Luxembourg. This measure, established on March 1, 2009, is called the “child care voucher.” Each child under 13 years is entitled to free out-of-school care for 3 hours per week and 21 hours at a greatly reduced cost. This benefit focuses mainly on communal day care centers, which care for children after school until their parents finish work, but the voucher can also be used for other activities (relating to sports, culture etc.). This measure is restricted to resident parents and could be considered to discriminate against transborder commuters. The female employment rate has impressively progressed from 53.8% in 2000 to 61.3% in 2009.

The public pension system is well-developed, with a minimum monthly pension of €1,514 producing a redistribution of wealth in favor of the elderly. This can be illustrated by the following citation from the 2009 OECD Pensions survey: “On average, men in Luxembourg will receive around $825,000 in pensions over their lifetimes and women around $1 million. Luxembourg may be an extreme example, but lifetime pensions are worth $400,000 for men and $475,000 for women on average in OECD countries.”
Despite its extreme generosity, the public pension system is doing well, with huge reserves of around €10 billion, or 3.6 times annual expenditure. This is due to the recent sharp increase in the workforce, which has led to growth in the number of affiliated members, as well as their relative youth. But funding is only provided in the medium-term and will be threatened when the number of affiliates starts to decline. According to the Social Services Authority in Luxembourg (Inspection Générale de la Sécurité Sociale, IGSS), employment in the country will need to treble by 2060 to maintain pension equilibrium.
The Luxembourg Business Union (Union des entreprises luxembourgeoises, UEL) is concerned about a system that, even based on optimistic assumptions, will produce a cumulative deficit of 190% of GDP by 2050, and has presented a plan to reform it. Some of its propositions include: reducing the current replacement rate (which is now often above 75%); removing the systematic and automatic adjustment of pensions to the general trend of wages, lowering the maximum contribution threshold, which is currently €8,413; and encouraging employees to opt for a later retirement.

In 2009, 43.7% of Luxembourg’s resident population were of foreign origin. The number of foreigners has increased significantly (44,570 between 2000 and 2008), but the number of arrivals and departures is even greater (125,213 arrivals and 80,643 departures during the same period). These figures show that integration policy is an important issue in Luxembourg. As xenophobia is quite marginal, or at least not openly expressed in public, we can say that the country’s integration policy works well.
The citizenship law was revised to allow for dual citizenship from January 1, 2009. At the same time knowledge of the Luxembourgish language has been made obligatory for anybody who wants to attain citizenship.
The ability to retain their citizenship of their home country while becoming Luxembourgers has encouraged new groups of well-integrated foreigners to take advantage of this opportunity. As shown in the assessment covering the first 10 months of the new procedure, the number of applications has multiplied by four compared to the same period the year before; the language test too has not been an insurmountable barrier.
Nevertheless, immigrant associations point out the vexatious and deterrent nature of the test, which – in their eyes – has no reason to exist in a multilingual country, where French is the principal language of communication. They see it mainly as a measure of appeasement, a concession to conservatives fearing foreign infiltration.
A new integration law (Loi du 16 décembre 2008 concernant l’accueil et l’intégration des étrangers au Grand-Duché de Luxembourg) reorganizes the administrative structure managing integration policy by creating the Luxembourg office of reception and integration (Office luxembourgeois de l’accueil et de l’intégration, OLAI). This office has the following responsibilities: implementation and coordination of reception and integration policy; implementation and management of the ”reception and integration contract”; facilitation of the integration of foreigners; definition of a “national action plan for integration and against discrimination”; definition of a five-year national report on the integration of foreigners; administration of accommodation facilities; supervision of asylum seekers; and action against discrimination.
The reception and integration contract, which is voluntary in nature, contains some reciprocal commitments for the government and the immigrant to organize and facilitate their integration: the government undertakes to provide language training and civic courses as well as measures to promote the social and economic integration of the foreigner; the immigrant is committed to participate in societal life.
The electoral law at the municipal level will be changed in favor of foreigners.

External security is guaranteed by Luxembourg’s membership in NATO and its military budget is expected to increase to 0.7% of GNP by the end of the most recent legislature, due to a general program of renovation of military installations and the purchase of military aircraft. Seven NATO states will purchase 180 A400M aircrafts with deliveries beginning in 2009. Luxembourg will buy one A400M in partnership with Belgium and has earmarked €120 million for this purpose. Due to delivery difficulties, this sum is expected to increase, but the Luxembourg defense minister has already said that he stands ready to cover some of the extra costs. This aircraft is used primarily to carry personnel, equipment and cargo into conflict areas.
Luxembourg’s participation in peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan, southern Lebanon and other humanitarian missions is not disputed, but the acquisition of the A400M is highly controversial, especially since the government is reducing social protections at the same time. This issue is particularly worrisome among core supporters of the LSAP, namely its trade union wing and its youth organization.

According the “Mercer’s 2009 Quality of Living Survey” Luxembourg is the safest city in the world (outpacing Bern, Geneva, Zurich and Helsinki) and the inhabitants of the country feel less threatened by crime than the EU average. Although crime statistics have increased over the past five years, internal security has not become a political issue.
The explanation for this probably lies in the fact that these statistics reflect an increase in police activity rather than crime. The financial resources of the police have been greatly expanded in recent years, from €90 million a year in 1999 to €160 million in 2009. Furthermore, a new law provides for the reinforcement of security forces; in five years, their number will increase by 25%.

Sustainable governance has been declared to be one of the priorities of the 2009 government program. One important step in this direction is the creation of a super-ministry called the Ministry for Sustainable Development and Infrastructures. This will combine the former departments for the environment, transport, territorial planning and public works.
Luxembourg’s commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce its emissions by 28% has had no real impact up until now. Per-capita CO2 emissions still are the highest in the OECD (three times the European OECD average). According to forecasts, Luxembourg will have to heavily buy pollution credits from the European Union greenhouse gas emissions trading system. Since 2007, and following the “polluters pay” principle, the annual vehicle road tax has been based on CO2 output and a tax on road transport fuel has been introduced, both dedicated to funding the Kyoto penalties. But as fuel prices remain significantly lower than those of neighboring countries, 75% of sales are made to non-residents. This so-called petrol pump tourism is reduced by increasing taxes; too slowly, however, according to environmental groups.
In its “Environmental Performance Review,” the OECD acknowledged the efforts of the government, especially the incentives to purchase cleaner cars and more energy-efficient household appliances, and the encouragement of energy savings and use of renewable energies in the home. It also welcomed the 2009 Action Plan to promote environmental research and the development of green technologies. The OECD report formulated a total of 41 recommendations (foster the “user pays” principle to improve water quality and reduce waste production; encourage sustainable farming, etc). It also pointed out the lack of coherence of some measures. For instance, the aforementioned actions to reduce fuel consumption are counterbalanced by generous deductions on income tax for commuters.

Overcoming the backlog of Luxembourg’s research activities is a declared objective of the government. For this reason, it plans to raise expenditure for public and private research to 3% of GNP by the end of the legislative period in 2014. The two major actors of public research activities are the national research foundation (Fonds national de la recherché, FNR) and the University of Luxembourg.
The activities of the FNR cover three distinct domains: 1) supporting researchers (implementing a research program which reflects national research priorities; attracting outstanding researchers to Luxembourg; improving young researchers’ working conditions with grants for doctorate and post-doctorate training); 2) improving Luxembourg’s research environment and institutional framework; and 3) promoting scientific culture, particularly among the young. The government funds are allocated through a three-year performance contract (€40 million in 2010). A common criticism of the FNR is that its bureaucracy grows more quickly than its research activities and that too much money is spent on ancillary costs.
The University of Luxembourg was founded in 2003 and is still in its formative phase. Momentum has been slowed as its new campus, on former industrial wasteland, is still under construction. The university thus is a good example of a widespread problem in Luxembourg: projects are started before they are fully designed and are then further developed through improvisation and negotiation among stakeholders, leading to troubles and unwanted outcomes. But in a small country that lacks critical mass in its administration, this grassroots or bottom-up approach is often the only possibility to effect change.
The university’s four-year development plan for 2010 to 2013 defines five research priorities: 1) international finance; 2) security, reliability and trust in information technology; 3) systems biomedicine; 4) European and business law; and 5) learning and development in multilingual and multicultural contexts. Critical voices note the strong emphasis given to the finance department in these priorities (the so-called Luxembourg School of Finance) and view some industry sponsored chairs as a “submission to the neoliberal ideology.”

Luxembourg is a multilingual society and to succeed in its educational system students must master the three official languages (Luxembourgish, German and French) as well as English in high school. Intensive language teaching leaves little time for other subjects. Forty percent of students are of foreign origin and have difficulties coping with the linguistic requirements, especially when they immigrate with their parents after school entrance age.
Luxembourg’s school system is highly selective and especially discriminatory toward students with a migrant background. It is also the most expensive school system within the OECD: a student costs more than two times the OECD average ($209,060 “cumulative expenditure per student over the theoretical duration of primary and secondary studies”). This amount is explained by high teacher salaries, but seems not so extravagant when it is put in the perspective of per capita GNP.
The first PISA study, which ranked Luxembourg at 29 out of 31 countries, came as a shock and after the 2004 elections the new LSAP education minister launched an ambitious reform of school in general and language teaching in particular. Since the coalition was renewed in 2009, the reforms will continue. The government is correct when it declares that it has done more in this regard during the most recent legislative period than any government before it. The government has undertaken reforms of the School Act of 1912, which defines the organization of primary school, as well as vocational training, and a reform of the secondary school system is under way.
To give an idea of the content of the primary school reform and to rebut the charge that the school pays too much attention to abstract knowledge – such as vocabulary and grammar instead of real speech skills – teaching will be determined by a new paradigm: the competency-based skills approach. Students will continue to acquire knowledge, but the school will be committed to making them capable of using this knowledge in new and varied contexts. The outdated rating system based on a 60-point scale will be progressively replaced by new assessment tools fostering documentation of progress made and promoting motivation among the children. Teamwork between teachers and between pupils, as well as attempts to combat failure and exclusion, are other main features of the new approach.
It is too soon to assess the real impact of these reforms. But, as is often the case in Luxembourg, the reforms were poorly planned and carried out hastily. For instance, the pilot projects started over the past few years were not really evaluated and teachers do not seem prepared to change their habits and their mentalities.