To contrast the severe global recession of 2009, governments in most advanced countries implemented expansionary fiscal policies leading to a steep increase in public debt. As economies recover, a critical choice is whether to stabilize debt at post-crisis levels, or to bring it down to...

With economic integration rapidly growing at all level, understanding the incentives that this provides in the design of fiscal policies at the national level is fundamental. The most obvious implication of international competition on the taxation of mobile factors is a race to the bottom in...

The paper proposes a measure of countries' welfare based on individuals' lifetime utility and applies it to a large sample of countries in the period 1960-2000. Even though welfare inequality across countries appeared stable, the distribution dynamics points out the emergence of three clusters....