This paper analyses the factors influencing the price of oil and its likely evolution over the next quarter century. It begins by investigating the fundamental forces shaping long-term oil price developments, highlighting the importance of growth-led demand for oil, particularly that emanating...

The financial crisis and economic downturn are going to weigh on fiscal positions in OECD countries over the short to medium-term, both through the operation of automatic stabilisers and the enactment of discretionary fiscal stimulus packages. However, the strategic policy options facing OECD...

Frequent recourse to large one-off operations in a number of OECD countries has undermined the accuracy of cyclically adjusted fiscal balances as a measure of both the sustainability of public finance and the fiscal stance. This paper first provides detailed information on the nature and amount...

The paper examines the linkages between housing markets and the business cycle in OECD countries, focusing on how differences in the degree of resilience to economic shocks can be affected by the structural characteristics of housing and mortgage markets. The paper focuses specifically on: the...

Estonia has already experienced many benefits of increasing international integration, most obviously in significant convergence. From the Russian crisis in 1998 to the great recession in 2009 Estonia gained an impressive 20% in GDP per capita relative to the EU27 average in PPPs. Like the other...

Performance of fiscal policy, while good in international comparison, is not sufficient to prepare for future ageing-related spending increases. Subject to macroeconomic developments, the pace of consolidation could be more ambitious than currently planned, with a view to reducing the debt...

This paper develops a method for adjusting structural budget balances for asset price cycles and presents estimates of structural budget balances corrected for house-price and equity-price cycles for OECD countries. The traditional cyclically adjusted budget balance indicator, which is the basis...

This paper estimates the elasticities of government revenue and expenditure items with respect to the output gap for European Union (EU) countries. These elasticities are used by the European Commission, as part of the EU fiscal surveillance process, to calculate the semi-elasticity of the...

The Slovak economy experienced a strong but short recession in 2009. The recovery afterwards was driven by exports and investment. While GDP growth was one of the strongest in OECD, employment did not reach the pre-crisis level and unemployment remains stubbornly high. This paper argues that...

The challenge for fiscal policy in Slovakia is to achieve fiscal consolidation in a way which supports the fragile recovery and protects spending on areas which are important for re-embarking on a trajectory of high trend growth and underpinning a catch-up in living standards. While the recently...