The Euro Plus Pact was approved by 23 EU countries in March 2011. The Pact stipulates a range of quantitative targets meant to strengthen competitiveness and convergence with the ultimate aim of preventing unsustainable financial imbalances from accumulating. This paper uses Granger causality...

The linkages between housing wealth and household consumption are contentious. This paper uses a recently introduced statistical concept, housing equity withdrawal (HEW), to investigate the linkages in the case of Estonia. HEW is defined as net borrowing by the household sector, which is secured...

Estonia introduced a new corporate income tax system in 2000, under which corporate profit is taxed only when it is paid out as dividends to shareholders. The switch to distributed profit or dividend taxation was billed as a means to attract investment, support enterprises and increase...

The EU cohesion policy funding aims to enhance economic, social and territorialcohesion across regions and countries in the European Union. This paper discusses theimplementation of the policy in Estonia since 2004 using as background information surveysof the theoretical and empirical...

Pissarides & Weber (1989) proposed the use of data on income and food consumption for estimating the extent of income underreporting and possibly tax evasion by the self-employed. This paper is the first to investigate the importance of the way in which self-employed households are identified....

This paper uses regression analyses to explain the different output performance in the 27 countries in the EU based on measures of their pre-existing vulnerability and resilience. Rapid financial deepening and high financial leverage, both domestically and externally, were followed by larger...

This study investigates the process of price convergence in the ten new EU countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The analyses are based on panel data from 1995 to 2008 of the common currency price relative to the EU15 average. The lagged income level exhibits little explanatory power toward...

This paper compares the prevalence and determinants of unreported employment in the three Baltic countries in 1998 and 2002 using a hitherto little used data set. The prevalence of unreported employment varies substantially across the three countries and across the two sampling years....

This paper estimates the extent of income underreporting by households with business income relative to households of wage earners in Estonia. The paper uses a modified version of the methodology pioneered by Pissarides and Weber (1989). The extent of income underreporting is estimated by...

After the global financial crisis, some governments in the EU experienced serious debt financing problems, while others were less affected. This paper seeks to shed light on the divergent fiscal performance by assessing the fiscal conduct in the EU countries before and after the outbreak of the...