From the Irish perspective, the impact of debt overhang on long-term growth in the advanced economies presents a clear warning. Ireland's debt overhang is outright extreme. Across the 18 advanced economies, weighted average real economic debts stood at 307% of GDP at the end of 2010 and are...

In a bid to realize its development aspirations, Tanzania has made concerted efforts to increase public investment, particularly in the last decade. A significant proportion of these investments are financed by contracting debt, manifested by the rapid accumulation of public debt, especially...

We estimate the relative impact of consumption and income taxes on aggregate saving rates using panel data of OECD countries over 1975-2007. In a fixed-effects model and using tax rates and other key variables averaged in five-year intervals, we find that consumption taxation is generally...

A fully inflation-indexed economy stabilizes economic inter-temporal relationships and offers a set of potential benefits: hedging the economy against inflation; improving the performance of the financial system; helping to lessen the most common housing and economic recessions of developed...

We calibrate an incomplete markets large scale OLG model to the US income and wealth distribution and examine the effects of alternative government debt levels and adjustment policies on macroeconomic aggregates and welfare. We find that the government should hold negative debt. Due to the high...

High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring. But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or below market real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for...

Even if Keynes makes an error with its investment multiplier, he has à good intuition investment is the key lever. The main mistake in order to manage economy is due to Friedman who stars with the right result to obtain : maximize Wealth, but he confuses wealth created with a permanent income...

The economic crisis in the early 1990s prompted action on reforming the Swedish welfare state and its institutions, including deregulation of a wide range of product markets. In that way, Sweden took early action compared to other OECD countries currently struggling with how to make public...

Malaysia has sustained over four decades of rapid, inclusive growth, reducing its dependence on agriculture and commodity exports to become a more diversified, modern and open economy. GDP per capita is now higher than in a number of OECD economies, while poverty and income inequality have...

In this paper, we investigate the interactions between public debt and transfer policies in a framework based on Floden [2001], that we extend to allow for transitional dynamics between steady states. First, we show that, starting from a high level of public debt, it is possible to implement a...