The Polish tax system is characterised by high social security contributions for both employers and employees. As a result, Poland has one of the highest tax wedges in the OECD, despite relatively low personal income tax rates. This, combined with a relatively high minimum wage and generous...

This paper provides estimates of the implicit fiscal assets as well as of the evolution over time of fiscal costs and revenues related to tax-favoured retirement saving regimes in 17 OECD countries, taking into account current and future contributions, asset accumulation and withdrawals, all of...

This paper examines whether regulation that is more conducive to competitive and efficient financial systems has a significant positive impact on sectoral output and productivity growth in a sample of 25 OECD countries. More specifically, following a methodology used by Rajan and Zingales...

There is widespread evidence that a better access to markets contributes to raising income levels. However, no quantification of the impact of distance to markets has been made on the basis of a sample restricted to advanced — and therefore more homogeneous — countries. This paper applies...

The substantial decline in private-sector saving rates observed in several OECD countries in the late 1990s coincided in several cases with a sharp increase in household financial net worth. This was seen by many observers as evidence that the strong rise in equity and residential property...

In several OECD countries, investment rates in the business sector grew strongly in the second half of the 1990s. In some cases, the strength of private investment relative to output growth had raised concerns about the risk of capital overhang and the prospect of a prolonged period of slow...

This paper analyses the major changes in both monetary and fiscal policy that have taken place over the past two decades and, within the limits of the existing empirical research, evaluates the overall costs and benefits for the OECD economies. The general findings for monetary policy are that,...