Pegging the renminbi (RMB) to the US dollar since 1994 has characterised China’s exchange rate policy, under either a fixed peg or appreciating crawling peg. The current policy, announced in June 2010, of ‘floating with reference to a basket’ has now in April 2015 made the RMB 19 per cent...

In welfare states, collective saving has declined to a persistently negative level, while reduced fertility and increasing longevity are leading to increasing pension liabilities. Actuarial neutrality across generations is presented as a benchmark for designing pension reforms to meet the...

The paper examines the effects of ageing and makes a case for partial pre-funding of pensions. The argument is based on inter-generational fairness in a situation where pension expenditure as compared to wages increases due to low fertility and increasing longevity. We illustrate the approach by...

Preparations are underway to revise national accounting to implement actuarial recording of pension liabilities for corporations and government as an employer. This paper extends this to unfunded public pensions with the help of ‘implicit tax’ in pension contributions. The clearest...

On 19 June 2010 the Chinese authorities announced that the renminbi (RMB) was henceforth to be pegged to a currency basket. Yet, it has quite closely followed the USD, though having appreciated by 2.7 % by the time of writing. At the G20 Seoul Summit on 11-12 November 2010, China committed to...

We explore the benefits of intergenerational risk-sharing through both private funded pensions and via the public debt. We use a multi-period overlapping generations model with a PAYG pension pillar, a funded pension pillar and a government. Shocks are smoothed via the public debt and variations...

The costs of population ageing are primarily reflected in larger expenditures on pensions and health care. This paper explores the consequences of ageing for the Netherlands in a baseline scenario simulated with a dynamic general equilibrium model. We discuss the sensitivity of the results under...

This paper presents evidence of profit shifting in response to differences in corporate tax rates for a large selection of OECD countries. In our estimates we control for the effects of tax rate changes on real activity. Our baseline estimates suggest that, on average, a unilateral increase in...

The combination of discretionary monetary policy, labor-market distortions and nominal wage rigidity yields an inflation bias as monetary policy tries to exploit nominal wage contracts to address labour-market distortions Although an inflation target eliminates this inflation bias, it creates a...

We study numerically the inter- and intra-generational welfare consequences of alternative pension fund policies in response to unexpected demographic, financial and macro-economic shocks. Our analysis is based on an applied many-generation OLG model describing a small-open economy with...