A key obstacle to fundamental tariff reform in many developing countries is the revenue loss that it ultimately implies. This paper establishes a simple and practicable strategy for realizing the efficiency gains from tariff reform without reducing public revenues, showing that for a small open...

The paper investigates the growth effects of public capital in Portugal using annual data for the period 1965-95. Both a production function and a vector autoregressive model are estimated. Public capital is shown to be a significant long-term determinant of output growth. The size of the...

The paper studies the employment effects of a deposit-refund scheme on labor in a simple search-theoretic model of the labor market. It is shown that if a firm pays a deposit to the government when it fires a worker, to be refunded when it employs the same or another worker, the vacancy rate...

The paper studies the dynamic allocation effects of tax policy in the context of an overlapping generations model of the Blanchard-Yaari type. The model is extended to allow for endogenous labor supply and three tax instruments: a capital income tax, labor income tax, and consumption tax....

The paper studies the setting of optimal fiscal policy in a second-best world with environmental externalities. The optimal second-best pollution tax is shown to lie below the first-best Pigovian tax, particularly if substitution between labor and polluting intermediate inputs is easy, the labor...

This paper reviews recent literature on the macroeconomic effects of environmental taxes. It attempts to delineate the conditions under which a cleaner environment is compatible with attaining macroeconomic objectives, such as more employment and economic growth. The analysis reveals that an...

The paper studies the dynamic welfare and macroeconomic effects of a revenue-neutral strategy of offsetting tariff reductions with increases in destination-based consumption taxes. To this end, we employ a dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open developing economy, featuring endogenous...

We study the dynamic output and welfare effects of public infrastructure investment under a balanced budget fiscal rule, using an overlapping generations model of a small open economy. The government finances public investment by employing distortionary labor taxes. We find a negative short-run...

The paper studies the revenue, eciency, and distributional implications of a simple strategy of ofsetting tariff reductions with increases in destination-based consumption taxes so as to leave consumer prices unchanged. We employ a dynamic micro-founded macroeconomic model of a small open...

This paper analyses the impact of the Global Financial Crisis on the Euro area utilizing a simple dynamic macroeconomic model with interaction between monetary policy and fiscal policy. The model consists of an IS curve, a Phillips curve, a term structure relation, a debt accumulation equation...