The evaluation of the IMF/Netherlands Program for legal and judicial reform in Indonesia was undertaken during July 2004 in Jakarta by a team of three persons appointed by the Government of Indonesia, the Government of the Netherlands, and the IMF. All three are well acquainted with Indonesia...

This paper is intended to accompany 'The Fund's Role and Mandate-An Overview' (the 'Mandate Overview Paper'). Taking into account the issues raised in the Mandate Overview Paper and, in particular, the potential areas for reform that it identifies, this paper provides a brief analysis of both...

Forward-looking behavior on the part of the monetary authority leads least squares estimates to understate the true growth consequences of monetary policy interventions. We present instrumental variables estimates of the impact of interest rates on real output growth for several European...

Market reaction to a change in official interest rates will depend on the extent to which the change is anticipated, and on how it is interpreted as a signal of future policy. In this paper, a technique is developed to separate the anticipated and unanticipated components of such changes and is...

Fiscal policy has a strong foundation in the multiyear program of spending cuts, tax reforms, and deficit reduction in Germany. Germany's focus on actual, rather than cyclically adjusted, fiscal goals and outcomes carries the risk of rendering fiscal policy procyclical. The recent business and...

The conceptual framework of this paper assumes that macroeconomic performance depends on the interplay between the economic environment and policies. Declining labor shares, wage moderation, and employment performance in Germany and the Netherlands have been presented. A number of policy changes...

The three-point VAT increase is part of a package in which unemployment payroll taxes will be reduced. Risks to the recovery are balanced but the range of forecasts for 2007 is unusually wide. The priority for Germany is to transmit its external strength to the domestic economy, thus further...