Opening Address - Brendan Whelan Assessing Ireland's Fiscal Strategy: Recent Experiments and Future Plans Philip Lane of Trinity College Dublin presents a paper reviewing a number of innovations which have been made by the Minister for Finance in the last four or five years. He considers the...

The Macroeconomic Context and Appropriate Fiscal Stance for Budget 2002: The changing macroeconomic background in which Budget 2002 must be framed is set out. The appropriate stance for budgetary policy as the economy moves towards lower growth rates are assessed including consideration of the...

The introduction of a property tax is now firmly on the policy agenda. Designing such a tax involves a series of choices which affect how the burden of the tax is distributed across households. In this paper we use SWITCH, the ESRI tax-benefit model, to explore the implications of alternative...