BEA’s national economic statistics provide a comprehensive view of U.S. production, consumption, investment, exports and imports, and income and saving. These statistics are best known by summary measures such as gross domestic product (GDP), corporate profits, personal income and spending,...

The international transactions accounts provide information on trade in goods and services (including the balance of payments and the balance of trade), investment income, and government and private financial flows. In addition, the accounts measure the value of U.S. international assets and...

This paper analyzes the scope for systematic rules-based fiscal activism in open economies. Relative to a balanced budget rule, automatic stabilizers significantly improve welfare. But they minimize fiscal instrument volatility rather than business cycle volatility. A more aggressively...

Several European Union countries have recently implemented or are envisaging fiscal that operations improve budgetary figures but have no structural impact on government finances. This paper evaluates some of these measures using a balance sheet approach. In particular, it examines the degree to...

This paper highlights the importance of debt composition in setting optimal fiscal and monetary policy over short-run business cycles and in the long run. Nominal debt as state-contingent debt can be a significant policy tool to reduce the volatility of distortionary government policy, thereby...

A weakness of decentralization and overall tax reforms in Latin America is the lack of attention to adequate taxation at the subnational government. A reliance on shared taxes with extensive earmarking leads to weak subnational accountability and soft budget constraints. The paper explores the...

By issuing tax-exempt bonds, the government can incur debt and never pay back any principal or interest, even if the economy without public debt evolves on a dynamically efficient growth path. The welfare effects of such a Ponzi type borrowing scheme are mixed. The current young will...

The paper shows how tax rate cuts can increase revenues by improving tax compliance. The intuition is that tax evasion has externalities: tax evaders protect each other, because they tie down limited enforcement capacity. Thus, relatively small tax rate cuts, which decrease incentives to evade...

Russia dramatically reduced its higher rates of personal income tax (PIT) in 2001 establishing a single marginal rate at the low level of 13 percent. In the following year, real revenue from the PIT actually increased by about 26 percent. This 'flat tax' experience has attracted much attention...

With much healthcare publicly funded, Hong Kong's rapidly aging population will significant raise fiscal pressure over coming decades. We ask what the implications are of meeting these costs by public funding, or private funding voluntarily or through mandates. Our simulations suggest that...