In recent years, the concern that the behaviour of subnational governments may hinder the achievement of national budgetary targets has been increasingly raised across the EU. In this paper the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and budgetary outcomes of the general government is...

Against the background of recovering growth and remaining fiscal consolidation needs, reforming tax expenditures may offer a promising avenue to raise revenue and, at the same time, improve efficiency of the tax systems. The workshop, held by DG ECFIN on 23 October 2013, addressed the economic...

The last few years have seen both a significant shift in EU state aid policy towards a more sophisticated economic approach and a great enrichment of the economic literature on state aid. This paper examines the control of state aid in the EU in the light of the new literature. It begins with a...

This paper establishes theoretically a link between investments in economic growth and investments in R and D. This raises the importance of innovation policies as they are designed to narrow the gap between the socially optimal and the privately optimal levels of R and D. As innovation policies...

Using a large international firm-level data set, we estimate separate effects of host and parent country taxation on the location decisions of multinational firms. Both types of taxation are estimated to have a negative impact on the location of new foreign subsidiaries. In fact, the impact of...

Ensuring high quality of public finances (QPF) with a view to supporting long-term economic growth has gained new urgency as the room for fiscal manoeuvre has shrunk in light of the current crisis. To more systematically analyse QPF and compare developments across countries and over time, a...

In EMU, a country may have difficulty ensuring stability in the face of asymmetric shocks; the response may be unstable, or, even if not, the real exchange rate might overshoot. Fiscal policy may help to stabilise inflation and also to target the real exchange rate. The paper argues that an...

The evidence from several euro-area countries demonstrates the existence of a forecast bias in the budgetary process, which negatively affects fiscal performance. To remedy this bias, we suggest that forecasting should be assigned to an authority independent from the ministry of finance and the...