Despite a deep recession in 2009 and weak growth in subsequent years, Hungary’s fiscal position compares favourably with many other OECD countries. Nonetheless, the underlying fiscal balance started deteriorating in 2010 and 2011. Recognising this, Hungary’s government launched an ambitious...

This timely and important Handbook takes stock of progress made in our understanding of what sustainable development actually is and how it can be measured and achieved. -- 'This Handbook demonstrates the well-established body of thinking on sustainable development which now exists, and its...

Hungarian debt level has steadily increased since 2001, with the debt-to-GDP ratio reaching about 84% at end-2011. This high level combined with significant volatility of macroeconomic variable influencing potential future debt paths – GDP growth, exchange rate and interest spreads – put...

In the wake of the financial crisis there has been renewed focus on the importance of a country’s net external debt position in determining domestic interest rates and, relatedly, its vulnerability to a crisis. This paper extends the panel estimation of OECD countries described in Turner and...

This paper estimates potential output losses from the global financial crisis by comparing recent OECD published projections with a counter-factual assuming a continuation of pre-crisis productivity trends and a trend employment rate which is sensitive to demographic trends. Among the 19 OECD...

This paper calculates new measures of human capital. Contrary to the existing literature, they are based on realistic rates of return to education, which are allowed to vary substantially across countries and to some extent over time. The new measures perform well in regression analysis...

This paper uses a new measure of human capital that works much better in explaining productivity in OECD countries compared to earlier measures of human capital to investigate the educational policy drivers of human capital. A novel methodology is utilised by interacting educational policies,...

A statistically significant relationship between the unemployment gap and inflation can be found for a clear majority of OECD countries, but the magnitude of the effect is typically weak. A corollary is that the effect of labour market slack on inflation can often be dominated by other shocks,...