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Two weeks from today, Alistair Darling will be waving his red briefcase on the steps of 11 Downing Street. In interviews, the Chancellor and Prime Minister have been laying the Budget groundwork.

Darling has conceded what we already knew: that his forecasts from last November are now a long way out of date and off course. Gordon Brown is today promising a link between the Budget, economic recovery and 'green collar' jobs.

What else might there be? The Chancellor will want to defend his cut of 2.5% in the rate of VAT, which was the centrepiece of the Pre-Budget Statement last November. It has had plenty critics, not least for its immense cost and lack of targeting.

That size of cut was all that was allowed under European regulations, which put a 15% floor on VAT across the EU to avoid wide, cross-border variations on product costs.

After the Bank of England governor warned against untargeted fiscal stimuli, it is the targeted (and cheaper) variety that is likely to get more attention.

For instance, how about a cut in VAT on restaurant bills from 15% to as low as 5.5%? This option has opened up in the past few weeks, since the European Council of Ministers and Parliament voted to let member states vary their VAT rates on that one sector.

In Britain, the restaurant business is being challenged by people trading down to pre-cooked supermarket meals and pizza deliveries.

The French government was quick to take up the option, having lobbied for it for ten years. It will apply to meals in cafes and hotels as well as restaurants, with the Paris finance ministry trying to ensure that the savings are at least partly passed on to customers. Maltese and Cypriot finance ministers are thinking along the same lines.

What about Mr Darling? The British were allied to the French lobbying operation that got the 'VAT on meals' exemption, but that was mainly so that Britain could apply lower VAT rates on some environmentally-friendly goods and services.

That now looks unlikely to happen as the Germans don't like such exemptions, they have the same veto on this issue that all member states have, and the Berlin government only agreed to the French proposal on restaurants on condition that a block is placed on future VAT exemptions.

This is only one of the innovative measures being used, considered or proposed around the world to respond to the economic and financial crisis.

We should all be familiar with the idea that governments pay people to scrap older, more polluting cars, if they buy a newer, slightly less polluting one.

The proposal sounds green, but the improvements in emissions are hardly decisive, and the calculation tends to ignore the climate changing impact of the manufacturing process. It has a lot more to do with protecting jobs.

It is helping out Germany's troubled motor sector, though that may be because Germans are loyal to their own car brands. The British are much less so, and the idea that it should be tried in Ireland would only help car dealers, who have seen a two-thirds drop in sales.

A typically blunt Australian response to economic crisis is arriving by cheque this week. Anyone earning under 80,000 Aussie dollars (38,600 pommie pounds) is receiving a cheque from their government for 900 dollars (£434), with less for higher earners.

While the government deficit soars, Australians can spend it as they want, all in the patriotic cause of boosting demand for goods and services.

At least as blunt was the Australian federal treasurer's view, expressed on radio earlier today, of what should happen to banks that fail to pass on interest rate cuts. Said Wayne Swan: "They do need a good kick up the bum occasionally".

In Ireland, an emergency budget yesterday sought to make politicians make some sacrifices along with the public, so the number of junior minister posts is being cut from 20 to 15. That's some sacrifice.

The Irish debate on tax is not just about rates but about what the tax base should be. It is partly that the Dublin government has exempted large numbers of earners from paying any income tax.

As of yesterday's emergency budget in the Dail, it is now planning to cast the net wider. It is also that Ireland has depended too heavily on property tax. The collapse of that market has left the country's public finances in a terrible mess.

The most innovative suggested response in Ireland is to tax texts, or what could be called a twitter tax. The idea, floated by the Green Party, is to put a one cent tax on every text message that is sent from an Irish mobile, and on the basis of last year's traffic, the finance ministry could rake in 100 million euros.

It's an unusual kind of regressive tax, loading it disproportionately onto teenagers. But it might give them a rude awakening in learning about public finances - which may be no bad thing, as they're the ones whose future taxes are going to be crucial to digging us all out of the current fiscal mire... boro 2day, pay l8r.