: This text contains the winter forecast 2014 of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, released on 17 December 2014. We present the recent economic developments in Switzerland and abroad, and discusses the main forecast results in the various sectors of the economy. We expect the Swiss...

The paper examines the nexus between inventory investment and the change in aggregate production during the "Great Recession" of 2008/09 for 29 European countries. A fairly uniform pattern emerges. Inventory investment is positively correlated with changes in production and follows the latter...

In a recent paper, I argued that Baumol's model of 'unbalanced growth' offers a ready explanation for the observed secular rise in Health Care Expenditure (HCE) in rich countries. Baumol's model implies that HCE is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth. I tested this...

I investigate whether demand growth and productivity growth in Switzerland have benefitted from the wage moderation that set in at the beginning of the 1990s in this country. The results suggest that the Swiss demand regime is profit-led while the productivity regime is wage-led. This means on...

This text presents the latest economic forecast conducted by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at the ETH Zurich on 21 June 2013. After an introduction describing the starting points and crucial assumptions underlying the forecast, we summarise the key results for Switzerland. Subsequently, we...

I investigate whether demand growth and productivity growth in Switzerland have benefitted from the wage moderation that set in at the beginning of the 1990s in this country. The results suggest that the Swiss demand regime is profit-led while the productivity regime is wageled. This means on...

This text presents the economic forecast of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich on 23 September 2013. After an introduction describing the starting points and crucial assumptions underlying the forecast, we summarise the key results for Switzerland. Then we turn to the international...

This paper is a contribution to a symposium mutually reviewing papers on Keynes's principle of effective demand as set out in The General Theory, by Allain (2009. Effective demand and short-term adjustments in the General Theory, Review of Political Economy, vol. 21, 1–22), Hartwig (2007....