A central requirement in the rapid movement of German Democratic Republic (GDR) toward a market economy is the introduction of a market-oriented tax system. The paper highlights the main features of the traditional socialist tax structure of the GDR and the current tax structure of the Federal...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

This paper describes how growing economic integration within the European Community increases the scope for any one EC country to impose adverse externalities on other member countries by manipulating its capital income taxes. After examining several alternatives to concerted tax harmonization,...

This Selected Background Issues paper on Switzerland reviews a few monetary and exchange rate issues, including questions related to the monetary policy framework and the assessment of recent monetary conditions and exchange rate developments. The paper examines the Swiss savings and investment...

This paper describes economic developments in Switzerland during the 1990s. Between 1990 and 1993, real GDP fell by a cumulative 11⁄4 percent. The tightening of monetary policy in response to rising inflation in the late 1980s induced a contraction in domestic demand that sent the economy into...

This Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix assesses Switzerland’s recent real GDP performance in terms of underlying movements in potential output and the cyclical output gap. The paper highlights that Swiss real GDP has been stagnant since 1990, after expanding at an average rate of...

This paper reviews economic developments in Switzerland during 1990–95. In the early 1990s, Switzerland experienced an unusually long recession, which bottomed out in the middle of 1993. Since then, the economy has returned to positive growth, with the main impulses coming from commodity...

This Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix evaluates Switzerland’s long-term growth and productivity performance. It analyzes the behavior of Swiss fiscal policy over the business cycle and takes a fresh look at the nature of the tradeoff between inflation and economic activity in...

This Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix compares two alternative time series approaches to analyzing Switzerland’s recent business cycle experience: first, the traditional “smooth-trend-plus-cycle approach,” which envisages observed output growth as fluctuating around a...

Although progress has been made in strengthening the Swiss economy, systemic risks posed by large banks as well as revisions to the macroprudential framework are still in train. The authorities welcomed the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) legislation and intervention of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) on...