This paper develops and applies a simple “conditional growth” framework to make long-term GDP projections for the world economy, taking as a starting point recent empirical evidence about the importance of total factor productivity and human capital in explaining current cross-country...

Digitalisation can be described as a sequence of technology and supply shocks which affect the economy through employment and labour markets, productivity and output, and competition and market structure. This paper focuses on how digitalisation - the process of diffusion of digital technologies...

In this paper we revisit the literature on the economic consequences from inefficiency in public services provision. Following Dupuit (1844) and Pigou (1947) we argue that it is important to take the financing side explicitly into account. The fact that public expenditure financing must rely on...

This paper provides empirical evidence showing that smaller countries tend to have more volatile government spending for a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000. We argue that the larger size of a country decreases the volatility of government spending because it acts as an insurance against...

We decompose fiscal policy in three components: i) responsiveness, ii) persistence and iii) discretion. Using a sample of 132 countries, our results point out that fiscal policy tends to be more persistent than to respond to output conditions. We also found that while the effect of cross-country...

Based on a rich database of government bond spreads and macroeconomic indicators over the period 2001-2008, we propose an empirical assessment of the role of fundamentals in driving long-term sovereign bond spreads of the new EU countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary,...

We investigate the impact of fiscal variables on bond yield spreads relative to US Treasury bonds in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey from May 1998 to December 2007. To account for the importance of market expectations we use projected values for fiscal and macroeconomic...

This paper uses a dynamic panel approach to explain the determinants of widening sovereign bond yield spreads vis-à-vis Germany in selected euro area countries during the period end-July 2007 to end-March 2009, when the financial turmoil developed into a full-blown financial and economic...