In 1998, effects emanating from the single European market had a major impact on the private insurance industry in Austria. For the first time, the industry recorded a decline in its revenues from casualty and accident insurance premiums. Price cuts made to survive in the fierce competition for...

Austria translated the "acquis communautaire" with respect to export guarantee schemes into action when joining the European Union in 1995. Public guarantees for outstanding debt from exports have since then been restricted to "non-marketable" risks. Therefore, the Oesterreichische Kontrollbank...

Water management in Austria is usually the responsibility of the public sector which through high connection rates to water supply and sewer pipelines makes an important contribution to public health and environmental protection. The funding required to maintain and expand the requisite...

Under the Stability Pact all member states of the future European Monetary Union commit themselves to achieving balanced budgets in a few years' time. If the agreed threshold for the public sector deficit of 3 percent of GDP is overstepped or the structural deficit continues to be high, the...

The advantageous legal conditions for pension funds have made occupational pension systems in Austria more popular since the last WIFO projection, done in 1994. However, compared internationally, Austria is still far behind other countries that have a strong public pension system. While the...

Export guarantees are among the few tools left for an active economic policy to promote foreign trade. Under international agreements, which are in place since 1996, guarantees have been restricted to non-marketable risks. As a result, the total volume of guarantees has been stagnating in recent...

The European Central Bank will introduce a new estimator of the cyclical component of the general Austrian budget balance which modifies and extends the method recently developed by the OECD. The estimation extracts the cyclical component from direct taxes on households, direct taxes on...

With gross premium revenues rising 12.3 percent to a total sch 129.5 billion in 1993, the private insurance industry slightly raised its GDP share to 6.1 percent. For 1994, the insurers' association anticipates a deceleration of revenue growth to 3 percent, implying inflation-adjusted stagnation...

The integration of European services markets and the implementation of associated European Union directives open up formerly closed national markets to competition from the Single Market. The purpose of this study is to measure the effects of liberalization on technical efficiency and the...

Badinger H. and Url T. (2002) Determinants of regional unemployment: some evidence from Austria, Reg. Studies 36, 977-988. Using a spatial filtering technique we estimate an empirical model of regional unemployment for a sample of Austrian regions. The spatial filtering technique removes the...