Small open economies within a monetary union have a limited range of stabilisation tools, as area-wide nominal interest and exchange rates do not respond to country-specific shocks. Such limitations imply that imbalances can be difficult to resolve. We assess the role that government spending...

Recent work on the relationship between tax structure and economic growth has offered little reliable evidence for developing countries. Yet it is in such countries where the greatest changes in tax structure not only have been seen over the past 30 years but will likely continue to be seen in...

Historically, Chile has been an economy dominated by mineral and agro-industrial products and subject to frequent external shocks particularly in copper prices. Since the 1980s, the authorities have developed various mechanisms to cope with these shocks and dampen their effects on the domestic...

The potential interactions among fiscal policies, investments and economicgrowth are complex and manifold.In this paper, we will perform a systematic comparative analysis of the variouseconomic insights that arecurrently available on these complex relationships, both theoretically (by aselective...

The potential interactions among fiscal policies, investments and economic growth are complex and manifold. In this paper, we will perform a systematic comparative analysis of the various economic insights that are currently available on these complex relationships, both theoretically (by a...

This paper surveys intergenerational altruism in neoclassical growth models. It first examines Barro's approach to intergenerational altruism, whereby successive generations are linked by recursive altruistic preferences. Individuals have an altruistic concern only for their children, who in...

In this paper we test whether a reallocation of government budget items can enhance long-term GDP growth in a set of European countries. We apply modern panel data techniques to the period 1970-2006, and we use three alternative dependent variables in a growth regression: economic growth, total...

I show that the zero nominal interest rate bound may render it desirable for society to appoint a fiscally activist policy-maker who cares less about the stabilisation of government spending relative to inflation and output gap stabilisation than the private sector does. I work with a simple New...

The global financial crisis rapidly spread across borders and financial markets, and also distressed EU bond markets. The crisis did not hit all markets in the same way. We measure the strength and direction of linkages between 16 EU sovereign bond markets using a factor-augmented version of the...

The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has increased the interest in early warning indicators, with the aim to indicate the build?up of fiscal stress early on and to facilitate crisis prevention by a timely counteraction of fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This paper presents possible...