Getting tax and transfer systems to efficiently deliver sufficient revenues to achieve macroeconomic targets, address goals in re-distribution and social welfare, encourage employment, accommodate business-competitiveness concerns and incorporate environmental issues is difficult. In Australia,...

This paper decomposes consumption tax revenues in OECD countries into the implicit tax rate (ITR) and consumption relative to GDP, to identify how economic downturns affect consumption tax revenues. It further considers the impact of changes in VAT efficiency and VAT rates on ITRs. The analysis...

Getting tax and transfer systems to efficiently deliver sufficient revenues to achieve macroeconomic targets, address goals in re-distribution and social welfare, encourage employment, accommodate business-competitiveness concerns and incorporate environmental issues is difficult. In Australia,...

Most of the literature on presumptive taxation limits its application to the less-developed economies. In this paper I argue that presumptive taxes are well entrenched in the modern world, although usually not classified as such. Presumptive taxes can take many forms, and can be incorporated in...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees, makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

Planned ‘‘surprise’’ devaluations are often spurred by non-economic circumstances: a rentseeking government; political instability; or the opportunity to put the blame on a predecessor government. In this paper, these aspects are incorporated in the monetary and fiscal policy framework...

How do we make sense of the cross-country heterogeneity in value judgments emerging from international surveys? Our study suggests that the answer needs to go beyond the adaptation of values to existing institutions and should tap into deeper beliefs. In our case, Finnish respondents do support...

The order and modalities of cross-member state redistribution as well as the net financial position of the member states are one of the most widely discussed aspects of European integration. The paper addresses selected issues in the current debate on the EU budget for the period 2007 to 2013...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labour market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

We model conflict between two agents in which each one has two possible strategies: cease-fire or rejection of the truce. We use the concept of pre-donations, namely, a redefinition of the game in which each agent commits to transfer a share of its output to the other agent (Sertel, 1991)....