This paper reports the main findings of a pilot project launched in July 2014 by the IMF's Statistics Department to test augmenting the IMF's financial soundness indicators (FSIs) with concentration and distribution measures (CDMs) to capture tail risks, concentrations, variations in...

Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 10, Fiscal Policy, Inequality and Welfare contains ten papers, both theoretical and applied, on tax progressivity and tax and transfer equity. Theory topics covered include consumption tax equity, alternative definitions of tax progressivity, horizontal...

While there are many methods to measure the competitiveness of an economy, most of these concepts ignore the fact that competitiveness can change not only because of market processes such as wage negotiation but also because of political decision making. Governments that compete with others for...

Indicators of government activity must be carefully designed to be relevant, credible and accountable. Frustration with reform pressures suggests that measures of policy activity are not providing accurate information. In fact, indicators of product or labour market regulation fail to measure...

This paper explores the determinants of deviations of ex-post budget outcomes from first-release outcomes published towards the end of the year of budget implementation. The predictive content of the first-release outcomes is important, because these figures are an input for the next budget and...

This paper examines to what extent slowdowns in economic growth are compounded by widening fiscal deficits and corresponding pressures on public debt after natural disasters. We rely on ifo GAME database (Felbermayr and Groeschl (2014)) that contains exogenous measures of physical disaster...