This paper presents the major characteristics of the Brazilian tax system, after underlining the modifications it went through since 1988, when the country adopted a new and democratic Constitution. One important feature is the marked incidence of indirect consumer and production taxes (49% of...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

This paper identifies tax policy that both speeds recovery from the current economic crisis and contributes to long-run growth. This is a challenge because short-term recovery requires increases in demand while long-term growth requires increases in supply. As short-term tax concessions can be...

This note generalizes Feldstein's (1976) criticism of Barro's(1974) analysis for the case that the interest rate exceeds the growth rate. This is done by considering an economy in steady state where all agents hold "Barro expectations": they believe that government debt must necessarily be...