The paper provides a selective survey of methods and findings concerning the impact of tax and welfare policies on employment, unemployment, and economic growth in OECD countries. The paper examines a number of facets of tax and welfare policy and concludes that cross-country macroeconomic...

This paper provides a largely nontechnical survey of concepts and issues related to the reform of the personal income tax, covering both base and rate aspects of the tax, as well as fundamental reform options. It also covers recent developments in selected OECD countries.

This paper presents a new dataset of fiscal consolidation for 17 OECD economies during 1978-2009. We focus on discretionary changes in taxes and government spending primarily motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by a response to prospective economic conditions. To identify...

Tax expenditures are perceived to represent a ‘pervasive and growing’ (OECD, 2010) element of many national taxation systems. Despite this, in many countries, there remains a critical lack of understanding of their impact and scale. A 2010 OECD analysis produced data for only seven of its...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of fiscal consolidation on economic activity in OECD economies. We examine the historical record, including Budget Speeches and IMFdocuments, to identify changes in fiscal policy motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by...

The third issue of the International Productivity Monitor produced by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains six articles that deal with a wide range of issues in the productivity area. Topics covered are the contribution of the information and communications technology sector to...

This paper reconsiders the effects of fiscal policy on long-term interest rates employing a Factor Augmented Panel (FAP) to control for the presence of common unobservable factors. We construct a real-time dataset of macroeconomic and fiscal variables for a panel of OECD countries for the period...

This paper examines the distributional effects of fiscal consolidation. Using episodes of fiscal consolidation for a sample of 17 OECD countries over the period 1978–2009, we find that fiscal consolidation has typically had significant distributional effects by raising inequality, decreasing...