It is widely argued that Europe's unified monetary policy calls for international coordination at the fiscal level. We survey the issues involved with such coordination of fiscal policy as a demand management tool and we use a simple model to investigate the circumstances under which...

The paper surveys unemployment policies for advanced market economies and evaluates them by examining the predictions of the underlying macroeconomic theories. The basic idea is that, for the most part, different unemployment policy prescriptions rest on different macroeconomic theories, and our...

Democratic countries with substantial inequality and where people believe that success depends on connections and luck induce political support for high tax rates and generous welfare states. Traditional wisdom is that such policies harm the economy, but there is not much evidence that countries...

The microeconomic foundations provided by the 'disequilibrium' macro-modelling approach of Barro-Grossman-Malinvaud are used to compare the performance of government spending and taxation as instruments of fiscal demand management in achieving a welfare optimum. Spending is successively treated...

This paper employs MIMIC, an applied general equilibrium model of the Dutch economy, to explore various tax cuts aimed at combating unemployment and raising labour supply. MIMIC combines modern labour-market theories, a firm empirical foundation, and a detailed description of Dutch labour-market...

This essay attempts to use the pure theory of welfare economics to address the ethical issues that underlie the choice of future population size. The essay begins with a summary of welfare economic theory as it pertains to situations where population size is not subject to choice, and notes that...