This paper explores how tax policy affects the level and allocation of national savings in the United States. It argues that the effect of taxes on the overall private saving level is relatively small and uncertain and that raising public saving is the most direct and efficient way to raise...

The apparent slowdown in U.S. investment and productivity growth in recent years has led to a number of proposals to stimulate investment through the adoption of tax incentives. This paper describes the incentives that were contained in the February 1993 Budget and estimates their effect on the...

The U.S. national savings rate has declined in the 1980s, with both public and private components falling. This paper discusses that decline and whether a policy response is needed. The drop in the private savings rate appears to reflect factors not easily reversible by policy and increases in...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

High and rapidly rising health care costs in the United States and growing ranks of uninsured persons have brought health care reform to the top of the U.S. Administration’s policy agenda. This paper describes the health care financing system in the United States, highlights what are viewed as...

The methodology used in this paper has three distinguishing features: the natural rate of unemployment and potential output are jointly estimated; estimation integrates wage and price data with “real” and structural data; and third, the methodology encompasses many of the methods found in the...

This paper examines the relative efficacy of cuts in government spending on goods and services and increases in taxation as tools for augmenting national saving--an issue related to Ricardian equivalence. The theoretical analysis shows little presumption in favor of spending cuts for this...

This paper considers the demand for various monetary aggregates with a view to assessing their potential roles as intermediate variables for monetary policy. Illustrative estimates using a generalized autoregressive distributed lag model are presented. For M1, the results support an “error...

In the 1980s, U.S. real investment in high technology equipment has grown rapidly while other components of business fixed investment have been weak. The surge in real high technology investment has been accompanied by a very sharp decline in its relative price, leading to difficult index number...