This paper explores the problem of effective taxation at the lower end of the income scale in Germany. For the recipients of social income maintenance--currently about 1.8 million nationals--effective taxation consists not only of the explicit taxation through the tax code but also of the...

This paper sheds new light on the external and domestic dimension of China's exchange rate policy. It presents an open-economy model to analyse the macroeconomic adjustment process in China under both flexible and fixed exchange rate regimes. The model-based results indicate that persistent...

The Danish fiscal consolidation of the early 1980s has received much scholarly attention because it was followed by an expansion of demand and output. The expansion of private consumption so far has been attributed to the expectations of future lower tax burdens. This article analyzes the...

Global financial regulators are currently reflecting on the nature of the insurance business. Specifically, they are trying to classify insurance into ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ activities, and to distinguish them from ‘non-insurance’ activities. Subsequently, they will seek...

Voting power methodology offers insights to understand coalition building in collective decision making. This paper proposes a new measure of voting power inspired from Banzhaf (1965) accounting for the proximity between voters by capturing how often they appear in winning coalitions together....

This paper details the methodological framework underlying the construction of the effective exchange rate (EER) indicators of the euro. This framework yields two sets of indicators - (i) one nominal and several real EER indices against a narrow reference group of euro area trading partners...

This paper presents a new concept - the global roles of currencies. The concept combines the domestic and international (cross-border) use of currencies, and therefore captures the overall importance of different currencies in a globalized economy. The measure of a currency's global role is...

This paper sheds new light on the external and domestic dimension of China’s exchange rate policy. It presents an open economy model to analyse both dimensions of macroeconomic adjustment in China under both flexible and fixed exchange rate regimes. The model-based results indicate that...