This paper shows that the behavior of entrepreneurs facing incomplete financial markets and risky investment can explain why growth accelerations in developing countries tend to be associated with current account improvements. The uninsurable risk of losing invested capital forces entrepreneurs...

Modern tax administrations seek to optimize tax collections while minimizing administration costs and taxpayer compliance costs. Experience shows that voluntary compliance is best achieved through a system of self-assessment. Many tax administrations have introduced self-assessment principles in...

Strong macroeconomic foundations have so far largely shielded the Netherlands from recent financial turbulence. Despite a tightening labor market, inflation remains subdued. Employment has grown 1¼–1½ percent in 2007, on par with the rest of the Euro area. The external current...

The Selected Issues paper analyzes how fast Ireland will grow in the future. The approach of this paper is to consider the catch-up in labor utilization productivity and use independent demographic projections and other considerations to make reasonable assumptions about labor productivity and...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the growth prospects of the Greek economy. It is estimated that exceptional factors boosted growth by 1 percentage point per year in recent years and, under current trends and policies, growth is likely to drop to about 3 percent by the end of the decade. The...

Work absence is an important part of the individual decision on actual working hours. This paper focuses on sickness absence in Europe and develops a stylized model where absence is part of the labor-leisure decision made by workers and the production decision made by profit-maximizing firms,...

Despite improvements in labor market performance over the past decade, owing in part to past reforms, Italy's employment and productivity outcomes continue to lag behind those of its European peers. This paper reviews Italy's institutional landscape and labor market trends from a cross-country...

This paper describes the developments in the Australian labor market during the 1990s. In 1994, a number of new labor market programs were launched, directed especially at the long-term unemployed, and a further step was taken in the evolutionary reform of the industrial relations system. The...

This study explores the effects of labor and product market deregulation on employment growth. Our empirical results, based on an OECD country panel from 1990-2004, suggest that lower levels of product and labor market regulation foster employment growth, including through sizable interaction...

Over the past decade, productivity-adjusted wages have grown at a slower pace in Japan than in other rich countries. This paper suggests that Japan's dualities between regular and "nonregular" labor market contracts and the relatively inefficient services sector have exacerbated the negative...