The Netherlands has ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets for the future - to cut them by 49 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and 95 percent by 2050. These targets and the likely new EU-wide targets under the recent EU Green Deal entail a rapid acceleration in decarbonization....

Growing international integration in trade and finance can challenge the measurement of external accounts. This paper presents a unified conceptual framework for identifying sources of mismeasurement of foreign investment income in current account balances. The framework allows to derive a...

Monetary policy space remains constrained by the lower bound in many countries, limiting the policy options available to address future deflationary shocks. The existence of cash prevents central banks from cutting interest rates much below zero. In this paper, we consider the practical...

One of the most striking tax developments in recent years, and one that continues to attract considerable attention, is the adoption by several countries of a form of ""flat tax."" Discussion of these quite radical reforms has been marked, however, more by assertion and rhetoric than by analysis...

Conventional wisdom has it that the value-added tax is not a suitable instrument for lower-level jurisdictions (‘provinces’) in a federal system. The problems that arise when it is so used have become a serious constraint on the development of the VAT—and closer economic integration—in...