Tax Reforms, Free Lunches, and Cheap Lunches in Open Economies

This paper focuses on the macroeconomic and budgetary impact of tax reforms in a New Keynesian two-country model. Our results show that both income and consumption unilateral tax rate reductions do not constitute a ""free lunch"", in the sense that they have negative budgetary consequences for the country which implements them. In addition, the degree of self-financing implied by our model is in the 8½-24 percent range. Since the degree of self-financing estimated in previous literature was larger, we conclude that in our model not only the ""lunch"" is not ""free"", but is also not that ""che