The current consensus on indirect tax reform in developing countries favors a reduction in trade taxes with an increase in VAT to raise revenue. The theoretical results on selective reform that underlie this consensus are, however, derived from partial models that ignore the existence of an...

Pension reform is now on the national agenda in most post-Soviet countries. These countries have highly informalized economies, which means that large areas of economic activity go unreported to the authorities. This paper deals with the problem of pension reform in a highly informalized...

This paper uses panel data from 1989 to 1995 on blue-collar workers in Finnish manufacturing industries and their establishments to assess the extent to which hours of work are affected by individual or establishment characteristics - observed as well as unobserved. We argue that recent research...

The paper presents a model of household labour supply that allows for simultaneous decisions of household members, complex and non-convex choice sets induced by tax and benefit rules, and quantity constraints on hours choice. The model is estimated using the 1993 Bank of Italy’s Survey of...

The added worker effect states that unemployment of a household member leads to an increase in labour supply of another household member. This paper investigates whether there is such an effect in a developing country. We use a rich data set for urban Ethiopia. We first give a brief description...

The commissioned study into the ageing of Australia’s population was released April 2005. The Commission found that one quarter of Australians will be aged 65 years or more by 2044-45, roughly double the present proportion. This gives rise to significant policy challenges. The Commission...

This paper is concerned with the empirical analyses of optimal taxation, adopting Equality of Outcome (EO) as well as Equality of Opportunity (EOp) as evaluation criteria. The EOp- and EO-criteria provide alternative methods for summarizing the efficiency-equality trade-off in the distribution...

During the last two decades, the discrete-choice modelling of labour supply decisions has become increasingly popular, starting with Aaberge et al. (1995) and van Soest (1995). Within the literature adopting this approach there are however two potentially important issues that are worthwhile...

Now that four years have passed since the introduction of the euro as a commercial currency, it has become possible to assess many arguments made in the abstract during the 1990s about the implications of monetary union. This contribution does precisely that. In brief, the euro zone still falls...