Premium revenues of the Austrian private insurance companies recently followed the business cycle profile only to a limited extent. Having stagnated in the recession year 2009, premium revenues rebounded in 2010 at a rate below nominal GDP growth. For 2011, the industry expects a slight...

The Austrian economy will not regain significant momentum before 2014. During the forecast period from 2012 until 2016 real GDP will grow by 1.6 percent per year on average. Exports will expand by 5.5 percent per year. Imports, by contrast, will increase by only 5.1 percent. The average...

By international standards occupational pensions are not very common in Austria. They are implemented using several financial modes. Of the three most important ones, i.e., pension funds, group life insurance and direct pension commitments only pension funds offer a comprehensive data base. Any...

The current financial crisis cannot be attributed to a single cause, but resulted from the interaction of several simultaneously active forces. The causes can be classified into three categories: macroeconomic causes, regulatory or supervisory shortcomings and causes related to incentives or...

In 2000, occupational pension systems comprised 430,000 individuals as eligible for a future old-age pension. With one out of six dependently employed persons entitled to a future company pension, this figure is markedly below EU average. Company pensions are most prevalent among major...

Under the Stability Pact all member states of the future European Monetary Union commit themselves to achieving balanced budgets in a few years' time. If the agreed threshold for the public sector deficit of 3 percent of GDP is overstepped or the structural deficit continues to be high, the...

The advantageous legal conditions for pension funds have made occupational pension systems in Austria more popular since the last WIFO projection, done in 1994. However, compared internationally, Austria is still far behind other countries that have a strong public pension system. While the...

Export guarantees are among the few tools left for an active economic policy to promote foreign trade. Under international agreements, which are in place since 1996, guarantees have been restricted to non-marketable risks. As a result, the total volume of guarantees has been stagnating in recent...

The European Central Bank will introduce a new estimator of the cyclical component of the general Austrian budget balance which modifies and extends the method recently developed by the OECD. The estimation extracts the cyclical component from direct taxes on households, direct taxes on...

Rating agencies transform information on a country's political, economic and financial situation into a summary indicator for investors. Thereby they mainly facilitate cross-border investment. In a number of empirical studies, ratings have been found to have been responsible for a widening of...