In recent years Austrian family policy was aimed at improving individual work-life balances and increasing the participation of fathers. This included introducing child care benefit months that cannot be transferred between partners, adding a short-term income-dependent option to the original...

Family policies vary considerably, in their focus as much as in the instruments used, in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, the countries chosen for the study. Germany's traditional type of family policy was fundamentally rehauled in recent years in order to boost female...

Apparently the consolidation programmes that individual EU countries have presented so far broadly tend to take "the easy road". The latter includes short-term cuts in public sector pay, which are easy to push through, but do not lead to a lasting improvement of public finances, as well as an...

One of the focal points of the discussion on the reform of Austrian public finances and the system of fiscal equalisation is the question of how to reform the municipal tax system. The accordance of spending and financial responsibilities (principle of connectivity) at the local level increases...

Intragovernmental transfers are an important element of the fiscal equalisation system. With respect to efficiency, the principle of fiscal equivalence or fiscal connectivity is central to the arrangement of fiscal relations between the individual levels of a federal state. Based on this...

The financial market and economic crisis has put severe strain on government budgets also in Austria. The costs of the crisis, to the extent that they can be quantified (support for banks, cyclical stimulus measures and contributions to the euro-area crisis management), have shifted the debt...

Efficient and effective fiscal equalisation is above all based on fiscal equivalence and the accountability of decision makers. This means that the public-interest orientated fulfilment of tasks based on the principle of subsidiarity can take place when the responsibilities for tasks, spending...

Bundesvoranschlag 2013: Konsolidierungspfad mit Unsicherheiten

WIFO is coordinating the integrative research project "Welfare, Wealth and Work for Europe – WWWforEurope", which is financed by the European Commission from its 7th EU Framework Programme and which combines 33 partner institutes from 12 EU member countries.