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...

Reforms aiming at lowering the tax burden and cutting social benefits may boost efficiency and output, and improve market adjustment to shocks, but, by reducing the size of automatic stabilisers, may also imply less cyclical smoothing. This would be problematic in EMU given the loss of national...

The fiscal philosophy of EMU's budgetary rules is to bring deficits close to balance and then let automatic stabilisers play freely. Given the large tax and benefit systems in Europe, relying mainly on automatic stabilisation would allow a relatively high degree of cyclical smoothing while...

This paper presents results of an on-going joint European Commission / OECD project, aimed at monitoring the direct influence of tax and benefit instruments on household incomes. Indicators of financial work incentives are needed for identifying any undesired influences of taxes and social...

The paper looks at the evidence on the widespread hypothesis in the academic literature and by some of the new Member States' governments that accession will bring about fiscal strains and requires higher budget deficits. It starts by calculating the expected new Member States' payments from the...

The paper analyses the macroeconomic gain from cost savings in public procurement in an extended version of QUEST III. Labour tax cuts in response to cost savings from cheaper procurement (0.5 pp mark-up decline per year over 10 years and 20% of procurement) raise GDP, employment and consumption...

Measures aimed at reducing the tax burden on labour have been advocated to alleviate the EU unemployment problem. Most of the analyses document a relationship between the unemployment rate and the tax burden on labour. Hence, it is not possible to discern whether the effect on unemployment...