Canton of Lucerne pledges CHF 300 million for location promotion
Lucerne - The Cantonal Council of Lucerne has adopted a package of measures for location promotion worth 300 million Swiss francs per year. With this, it hopes to prevent top taxpayers from emigrating because of the OECD minimum taxation. It also determined the opening hours for shops at charging stations.
The Cantonal Council of Lucerne is supporting the further development of location promotion. The Council has reported that it passed the relevant bill in its January session and amended the Act on Economic Development and Regional Policy. It provides a package of measures for location promotion of around 300 million francs per year.
This is Lucerne’s response to the OECD minimum taxation, which means that large international companies will have to pay more taxes in the future. As a result, the canton would lose its competitive advantage of low corporate profit taxes and fears that tax revenues and jobs could be lost, according to an earlier statement on the motivation for the package of measures and its contents.
The focus of measures now approved for the benefit of the economy is reportedly on promoting innovation, improving the tax burden and framework conditions with regard to digitalization, the development of commercial sites, the availability of commercial and residential land and a “customer-oriented” administration. The measures for the benefit of the population focus on improvements in the tax burden, work-life balance, culture and digitalization.
In addition, the Cantonal Council has decided that self-service shops without sales staff with a maximum area of 30 square meters may open daily from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. A restriction to farm shops was rejected by an extremely narrow margin. Shops with at least four charging points for electric vehicles with at least 150 kilowatts each and a simultaneous minimum total charging capacity of 300 kilowatts will be treated in the same way as petrol station shops. The SVP and SP political parties announced a referendum against the bill.
