In August 2009 the Congressional Budget Offi ce warned that the budget was on an unsustainable path. Preventing federal debt from growing faster than the economy over the long-run requires large increases in revenues and/or decreases in spending. We explore, using the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy...

Der Beitrag untersucht Paul Kirchhofs Vorschlag einer fundamentalen Mehrwertsteuerreform.

The interplay of a differentiated indirect tax structure and the variation in expenditure patterns across households, leads to a possibly unequal distribution of indirect tax liabilities across the population. This paper uses the ninth round of the RLMS survey to assess the distributional...

Die öffentliche Kritik, die 2010 der Senkung des Umsatzsteuer-Tarifs für Hotelübernachtungen von 19% auf 7% folgte, war insoweit überraschend, als der traditionellen Inzidenz-Hypothese zufolge Tarifsenkungen der Umsatzsteuer durch Preissenkungen Konsumenten zugutekommen. Sie wäre berechtigt...

Tax reform is a permanent topic of the economic policy debate in Germany. The paper presents a radical reform proposal (as well as a survey of other proposals) and describes some steps towards the realization of the proposal. The tax system proposed mainly consists of a value added tax, a flat...

In this study, we analyse the sustainability of fiscal policy of EU member countries within the panel cointegration and error-correction frameworks. Unlike the previous empirical papers in this area, we apply the test for panel cointegration between the primary budget deficit and the public debt...

We estimate the political economy determinants of budget deficit forecast errors. Since the adoption of the Stability Pact, Eurozone governments have manipulated forecasts before elections. The political orientation and the institutional design of governments also affects the quality of forecasts.

The study considers some of the factors determining budget balance. In particular, it investigates the relationship between budget balance and inflation. The analysis focuses on European states in the period between 1999 and 2007, and concludes that the relationship between budget balance and...

The paper enlightens popular part of the budget policy - deficit finance. In the process of securing economic conditions to surpass the current economic crises, the governments all over the world incline towards debt deficit finance. The intention is to describe the implications such as...