One of the most vivid discussions in every country is with regard to the assessment of fiscal policy. Since budgets are influenced by business cycles, there is enormous interest in disentangling the underlying fiscal position from the effect of the business cycle. The two main methods used by...

A house is generally considered as a 'roof over one's head', however, housing can be regarded as an investment or asset. Our paper focuses on this function of dwellings and develops a stochastic portfolio choice model for the housing market, which is easy to incorporate into medium and...

As part of the monetary transmission studies of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank, this paper attempts to analyse the role of the housing market in the monetary transmission mechanism of Hungary. The housing market can influence monetary transmission through three channels, namely, the nature of the...

Potential output figures are important ingredients of many macroeconomic modelsand are routinely applied by policy makers and global agencies. Despite itswidespread use, estimation of potential output is at best uncertain and dependsheavily on the model. The task of estimating potential output...

One of the most important aspects of consumer surveys is the computation of the consumer confidence index, which aims to provide accurate figures on the financial position and outlook of households as well as their intention concerning future consumption and savings. . Although the motion of the...

A proper fiscal framework should ensure fiscal sustainability while avoiding procyclicality of fiscal policy. As a prerequisite, fiscal rules should be based on numerical indicators that are conducive to both of these basic objectives. In this paper, we discuss problems that the existing...

Two economists of the National Bank of Hungary review fiscal developments during a decade of transition in Hungary. The paper examines the role of fiscal policy in stabilizing the economy in the face of external and reform-induced shocks, the way in which fiscal policy contributed to the...

In this paper we address the issue of tax burden and its measurement, beginning with a discussion of use of tax-to-GDP ratio for this purpose. We show that this commonly used indicator has a number of flaws, related to the methodology of calculation of taxes and GDP in national accounts....

Decomposing output into trend and cyclical components is an uncertain exercise and depends on the method applied. It is an especially dubious task for countries undergoing large structural changes, such as transition countries. Despite their deficiencies, however, univariate detrending methods...

Decomposing output into trend and cyclical components is an uncertain exercise and depends on the method applied. It is an especially dubious task for countries undergoing large structural changes, such as transition countries. Despite their deficiencies, however, univariate detrending methods...