This Selected Issues paper estimates a dynamic model of foreign currency loans to households in Austria to analyze their behavior and assess the effectiveness of measures intended to stem their rise. This paper also studies the developments in Austria’s economic linkages with Germany and the...

This Selected Issues paper reviews Belgium’s experience with fiscal adjustment and the long-term outlook for the public finances. The paper discusses the composition and scale of the fiscal adjustment, and the extent to which it has exerted a durable impact on the public finances. It offers a...

The Austrian authorities introduced new supervisory guidance aiming at constraining the funding model of the three largest Austrian banks’ subsidiaries. The guidance introduced the concept of Loan-to-Local-Stable-Funding Ratio (LLSFR) as a monitoring tool of business model sustainability....

This Selected Issues paper presents a comparison on public expenditure of Austria and other countries. In the past decade, Austria's government expenditure growth has been very steady, thus avoiding the boom-bust pattern of some other European countries. However, expenditure levels are...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the challenge of population aging for Belgium. It argues that the aging strategy should be broadened to include more explicitly the objective of raising employment rates to foster potential growth. The paper discusses assumptions underlying the official aging...

This paper provides a number of complementary estimates of potential output and the output gap—variables that cannot be observed directly. After a substantial increase in the tax wedge in the 1970s and the 1980s, which has been widely thought to have been partly responsible for the sharp rise...

Measuring the size of the underground economy is obviously a difficult task. This paper reviews the literature, as applied to Belgium and elsewhere, on the determinants of the gray economy. The methods that have been used to measure the size of the gray economy are also discussed. The estimates...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes fiscal devolution in Belgium. It examines long-term fiscal strategies for meeting the fiscal burden of population aging. The paper presents estimates of the fiscal costs of population aging in Belgium, and discusses their sensitivity to underlying assumptions....

Austria’s federal system comprises the federal government and nine provinces (Länder). The federal system is rather centralized by international standards, with the federal government (including social security funds) accounting for about 70 percent of general government spending, the...