Regional differences in GDP per capita, productivity, employment and poverty in Lithuania are among the largest in the OECD, and they have increased over the last decade. The country still recovers from the legacy of the Soviet planning system which aimed at balanced geographical distribution of...

The design of intergovernmental fiscal relations can help to ensure that tax and spending powers are assigned in a way to promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth. Decentralisation can enable sub-central governments to provide better public services for households and firms, while it...

This paper studies the potential impact of higher carbon taxation - to reach the government’s emission targets by 2030 - on Iceland’s economy. The paper is divided into two parts. First, a DSGE modelling exercise suggests that the equivalent of an oil price hike of between 30% and 55% is...

Productivity in Russia has fallen steadily over the past 15 years. This paper explores micro-level data to understand the contribution of individual firms to aggregate productivity. Overall, firm-level data corroborate the decline in aggregate productivity and a widening productivity gap against...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the “resource curse” phenomenon, i.e. the negative impact of oil abundance on long-term economic growth, for a set of oil exporting countries. It distinguishes between two potential drivers of resource courses: oil dependence and oil price...

Russia is a federation of more than 80 regions spanning across a huge territory. Natural resource endowment, inherited industrial specialization, remoteness and climate conditions contribute to large regional disparities. This paper presents an empirical framework model for assessing...

This paper provides an overview on Lithuania’s environment and environmental policy. Environmental performance has improved since the mid-2000s. Greenhouse gas emissions declined and decoupled from growth over the past decade, yet per capita emissions increased. Transport and energy are the...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between local taxation, land use regulation and land use patterns. The findings can be summarized as follows: 1) In more fiscally decentralized settings, sub-national land use regulation and fiscal policies encourage...