In the last decade the Italian pension system underwent many changes. The process has started in 1992 with three major reform laws (passed in 1992, 1995 and 1997), supplemented by many other minor changes. Among the innovations introduced in the pay-as-you-go social security system, the most...

This paper shows that increasing government social expenditures can make a substantive contribution to increasing household consumption in China. The paper first undertakes an empirical study of the relationship between the savings rate and social expenditures for a panel of OECD countries and...

Private investment is the principal transmission channel through which fiscal policy affects growth in high-income countries. In low-income countries, governance and also other considerations suggest that the primary channel is factor productivity. Empirical results reported in this paper...

Using data for a sample of developing countries and transition economies, this paper estimates the relationship between government spending on health care and education and selected social indicators. Unlike previous studies, where social indicators are used as proxies for the unobservable...

The recent sharp increase in fiscal deficits and government debt in many countries raises questions regarding their impact on long-term sovereign bond yields. While economic theory suggests that this impact is likely to be adverse, empirical results have been less clear cut, have generally...

This paper develops a new index which provides early warning signals of fiscal sustainability problems for advanced and emerging economies. Unlike previous studies, the index assesses the determinants of fiscal stress periods, covering public debt default as well as near-default events. The...

This paper proposes a set of fiscal indicators to assess rollover risks using the conceptual framework developed by Cottarelli (2011). These indicators provide early warning signals about the manifestation of these risks, giving policymakers the opportunity to adjust policies before extreme...