The paper addresses and summarizes the role of unemployment in the transformation process from an economic system with a dominant state sector to a system with a dominant private sector. After reviewing the basic facts and some of the main explanations why unemployment is high during transition...

This paper analyses fiscal policy for several economies in Latin America, from the early nineties to the 2009 crisis. We present original estimates of cyclically-adjusted public revenues for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay implementing the standardised...

During the next few decades the populations of most developed countries will grow older and older as a result of the low fertility rates since the 1970s and/or the continuously increasing life expectancy. Poland, one of the biggest countries in Central Europe, will be confronted rather seriously...

This paper analyses fiscal policy for several economies in Latin America, from the early nineties to the 2009 crisis. We present original estimates of cyclically-adjusted public revenues for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay implementing the standardised...

This paper studies sovereign debt relief in a long-term perspective. We quantify the relief achieved through default and restructuring in two distinct samples: 1920-1939, focusing on the defaults on official (government to government) debt in advanced economies after World War I; and 1978-2010,...

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop tests for threshold effects in the...

Climate change economics mostly neglects sizeable interactions of carbon pricing with other fiscal policy instruments. Conversely, public finance typically overlooks the effects of future decarbonization efforts when devising instruments for the major goals of fiscal policy. We argue that such a...

With the announcement to intervene on the financial markets in case of need to keep the Eurozone intact, the ECB has attenuated the pressure of the markets on the endangered peripheral countries of the Eurozone. Critics argue that by eliminating the market's disciplining interest mechanism,...

There is a growing debate about complementing the European Monetary Union by a more comprehensive fiscal union. Against this background, this paper emphasizes that there is a trade-off in designing a system of fiscal transfers ("fiscal capacity") in a union between members of different size. A...

Strengthening budgetary surveillance and coordination of budgetary policy measures in the EU is of vital importance for economic stability and growth. The decentralised decision making structure in most areas of budgetary policies, requires the need to balance national and common objectives;...