The early 1980s were a time of large budget deficits and increasing ratios of government debt to GNP for many of the OECD countries (Table 1), prompting concerns that the fiscal policies which led to such outcomes were not only unwise, but also unsustainable. Assessing wisdom is not easy,...

This paper describes the methodology used by the IMF staff to calculate the structural budget balance, estimates of which are published regularly in the IMF’s World Economic Outlook. The structural budget balance is the government’s actual fiscal position purged of the estimated budgetary...

Technological change is increasing the productivity of highly skilled workers but creating more challenging labour-market conditions for their low-skilled counterparts. These pressures are likely to grow, especially in light of progress being made in Artificial Intelligence. The NZ labour force...

Hagemann, describing the IMF's methodology to calculate the output gap, shows that no standardised procedure is imposed for all countries, though the production function approach tends to dominate. For some countries, the estimates of the IMF are based on direct HP filtering. The HP filter is...

Generational accounts provide answers to a simple question: how much will future generations have to pay in net taxes as compared to today`s generations? In this paper, we review the concept of generational accounting and provide estimates for Sweden, where public finances deteriorated...

This paper describes the methodology used by the IMF staff to calculate the structural budget balance, estimates of which are published regularly in the IMF`s World Economic Outlook. The structural budget balance is the government`s actual fiscal position purged of the estimated budgetary...

Demographic changes, such as those anticipated in most OECD countries, have many economics effects that impinge on a country's fiscal viability. Evaluation of the effects of associated changes in capital-labor ratios and the welfare and behavior of different generations requires the use of a...

Demographic changes, such as those anticipated in most OECD countries, have many economics effects that impinge on a country's fiscal viability. Evaluation of the effects of associated changes in capital-labor ratios and the welfare and behavior of different generations requires the use of a...