The Greek pension system has been costly, complex, and distortive, which has contributed to Greece’s fiscal problems and discouraged labor force participation. Several attempts to reform the system faltered due to lack of implementation, pushback by vested interests, and court rulings leading...

Chile’s pension system came under close scrutiny in recent years. This paper takes stock of the adequacy of the system and highlights its challenges. Chile’s defined contribution system was quite influential when introduced, and was taken as an example by other countries. However, it is now...

Sharing economic benefits equitably across all segments of society includes addressing the specific challenges of different generations. At present, youth and elderly are particularly vulnerable to poverty relative to adults in their middle years. Broad-based policies should aim to foster youth...

This paper examines the impacts on welfare, savings, labor supply, and the government budget of several possible reforms of the Polish pension and unemployment benefit systems. The framework of analysis is a life cycle simulation model of household consumption, labor supply and retirement...

Several European countries are currently considering reversing parts of their pension reforms that were adopted previously to improve sustainability. In this paper we present a framework that allows us to quantify the macroeconomic and fiscal costs of such reversals. We thereby integrate the...

Wide-ranging structural reforms are underway in Italy, aimed at addressing key bottlenecks in the product and labor markets. Our analysis, based on the IMF's Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal model (GIMF), attempts to quantify the potential gains to the economy from a comprehensive package...

The paper discusses the impact and implications of Korean unification by setting up a two-region endogenous growth model. The numerical solutions are based on the formal analytical model, and have been calibrated so that they reflect the observed features of the North and South Korean economies....

The paper analyzes the wage-employment effects of replacing unemployment benefits by negative income taxes. It first surveys the major equity and efficiency effects of unemployment benefits versus negative income taxes, and summarizes the salient features of many European unemployment benefit...

Nonfinancial private sector debt increased significantly in advanced economies prior to the global financial crisis and, with a few exceptions, deleveraging has been limited. Furthermore, in some countries households and corporations have continued to accumulate debt. Drawing on the literature,...

In this paper, we study the macroeconomic impact of pension reform options in Chile, using a dynamic general equilibrium model. The main reform proposal considers raising contributions (employer side) and vehicle additional proceeds to individual accounts and to increase the support of...