The government debt ratio in Austria will rise above 74 percent of GDP in 2012. The quantifiable costs of the financial market crisis and the global recession account for nearly 7¾ percentage points of this ratio, further discretionary measures and statistical revisions for the last few years...

Auch in Österreich wurden zur Bewältigung des Konsolidierungsbedarfs im Gefolge der aktuellen Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise neben Ausgabensenkungen u. a. vermögensbezogene Steuern erhöht. Die Debatte um die (künftige) Bedeutung von vermögensbezogenen Steuern, die auch außerhalb...

Measures targeted at the revenue side of the budget can contribute between € 10 and € 28 billion to the consolidation of public finances. This total amount could be reached without harming the economy via an increase of excise taxes, an enhanced taxation of wealth and the abolition of tax...

The Austrian Federal Government has set itself the goal to reduce the Maastricht deficit to 2.7 percent of the GDP by 2013. In the medium term, a consolidation of the public budgets will be necessary to regain room for manoeuvre for budget policy and to avoid undesirable distributive effects of...

Apparently the consolidation programmes that individual EU countries have presented so far broadly tend to take "the easy road". The latter includes short-term cuts in public sector pay, which are easy to push through, but do not lead to a lasting improvement of public finances, as well as an...

There is evidence that a budget consolidation strategy can work with only a small and short lived negative impact on growth. However, this time consolidation is taking place in the aftermath of a deep crisis which had lead to increased levels of uncertainty. In addition the financial sector, as...

Real gross domestic product will expand by 2.2 percent per year during 2011-2015. The unemployment rate (according to the Public Employment Service Austria, AMS) will amount to 6.8 percent on average during 2011-2015. Due to increasing foreign and domestic labour supply labour market conditions...

With the trough of the recession following the global financial market crisis having been passed, fiscal policy is faced with the need to return to a sustainable path. The federal government targets a reduction of the general government deficit (in the Maastricht definition) below the ceiling of...

Led by a dynamic export growth real GDP in Austria grew by 2 percent in 2010. Between 2011 until 2015 the Austrian economy is expected to grow by 2.2 percent. The annual growth rate of trend output will average at 1.7 percent in the forecast period, ¼ percentage point below the average of the...