The 2003 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy has been assessed as an important reform in the right direction with respect to allocational efficiency and regarding environmental, animal welfare and food safety requirements. From an economic point of view the introduction of decoupled direct...

While the Maastricht Treaty establishes the entry conditions for Member States to join the single currency, the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) aims to make budgetary discipline a permanent feature of EMU. Consequently, the Pact is commonly interpreted as a major building block of EMU's...

This paper discusses the future of the corporate income tax in an integrating world economy. The first part of the paper reviews some important trends in corporate taxation across the OECD area. The second part discusses the role of the corporation tax, laying out guidelines for corporate tax...

This study brings out policy lessons for China today, a financially repressed country, from the financial liberalization process in Denmakr, Finland, Norway and Sweden in the 1980s and early 1990s. This report identifies a set of policy lessons for China today from the experience of financial...

This paper reviews the macroeconomic use of national fiscal policy in EMU and examines the rational and scope for a collective insurance system which redistributes income among countries in response to asymmetric cyclical shocks. The analysis of the record of national fiscal policies before and...

This report studies how adjustments in the European labour markets are a major source of economic resilience and integration. As such, they warrant in-depth understanding and close monitoring in the specific context of Eurozone and national fiscal policies.

Despite the fact that the correlation between policy rates in the U.S. and in the euro area has been low—at least over the past three decades—long term interest rates in the two regions have been highly correlated. More recently (since the early 1990s) their levels have also...

The paper discusses the risks and challenges faced by the new members on the road to the euro and the strategies for and timing of euro adoption. We investigate the real-nominal convergence nexus from the perspective of euro area entry. We argue that the initial level of economic development as...

In recent years a new consensus has emerged in macroeconomics in general and in model building in particular, the so called New Keynesian Paradigm (NKM).This paper applies Bayesian estimation techniques to a time series data set of the euro area and presents estimates of a DSGE model. The...

This paper develops an approach to measure the uncertainty surrounding expected GDP growth that prevails in the economy. This is accomplished by making use of consensus forecasts of GDP growth and by studying the properties of distributions of forecasted euro area GDP growth. A euro area...