The paper examines potential challenges arising at Member State level from the need and scope for either consolidating on the revenue side or shifting taxes away from labour. It uses a systematic indicator-based screening to identify Member States that may face a challenge in each of these two...

Why is Greece such a surprisingly closed economy? We employ a gravity model of trade to explain the appallingly poor export performance of Greece and argue that weak institutional quality accounts for a large part of this shortfall. Using a rich dataset of bilateral value-added exports of goods...

This paper provides evidence on the size, composition and cyclicality of discretionary tax measures (DTM), using a new database developed by the Output Gap Working Group. While their average magnitude is fairly limited over a long period with discretionary tax cuts being offset by discretionary...

This paper argues that the sovereign debt crisis is the result of a lack of fiscal discipline broadly defined to include adequate banking supervision. The paper argues that Europe has inadvertently adopted the wrong model of collective discipline, because it is centralized while a decentralized...

The objective of this paper is to empirically analyse whether sound fiscal and macroeconomic policies are beneficial to the achievement of the socio-economic development objectives enshrined in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, and in particular whether sound policies have an...

This paper focuses on potential public pension expenditure, pension adequacy and fiscal sustainability effects when linking retirement ages and pension benefits with future increases in longevity. Simulation results show that the expected increases in public pension expenditures as a share of...

This paper analyses the flow of credit in the UK economy in the years before and after the 2008 financial and economic crisis, with particular emphasis on the corporate sector and the SME segment. It carries out a comparative flow-of-funds analysis highlighting the parallelisms and differences...

The objective of this paper is to examine the possible implications of the adjustment of global and intra-European imbalances, particularly in terms of the macroeconomic impacts. We design a series of macroeconomic scenarios and look at the impact of global and European shocks (corresponding to...

Europe is going through an unprecedented period of fiscal consolidation and structural economic policy reforms. However, reforms undertaken in times of financial market stress may not be politically viable in the long run if they lack the necessary social balance. This paper studies the...

This essay reviews half a century of developments in bargaining coverage, the structure of bargaining, and bargaining coordination respectively in thirty countries, with an emphasis on the last twenty years. Under coverage or the extent of collective bargaining and pay setting, the connection...