Indicators of government activity must be carefully designed to be relevant, credible and accountable. Frustration with reform pressures suggests that measures of policy activity are not providing accurate information. In fact, indicators of product or labour market regulation fail to measure...

Economists recommend to partly redistribute gains to losers from a structural reform, which in many cases may be required for making the reform politically viable. However, taxation is distortionary. Then, it is unclear that compensatory transfers can support a Pareto-improving reform. This...

Economists recommend to partly redistribute gains to losers from a structural reform, which in many cases may be required for making the reform politically viable. However, taxation is distortionary. Then, it is unclear that compensatory transfers can support a Pareto-improving reform. This...

Do structural reforms that aim to boost potential output also change the distribution of income? We shed light on this question by looking at the broad patterns in the cross-country data covering advanced, emerging-market, and low-income countries. Our main finding is that there is indeed...

The objective of this paper is to investigate which factors ] macroeconomic, policy ]related or institutional ] foster the implementation of structural reforms. To this objective, we look at episodes of structural reforms over three decades across 40 OECD and EU countries and link them to such...