Unemployment in South Africa is extremely high and unevenly distributed, being concentrated among young less-skilled blacks. The legacies of apartheid can explain part of the increase in labour supply and inability of the economy to absorb it which produced the extreme levels of unemployment,...

This paper reviews the public expenditure system in the Czech Republic and the scope for its reform. In recent years much progress has been made in improving the transparency and management of government finances. Nevertheless, the budget and policy planning process retains a single-year and...

The paper is devoted to an empirical examination of the information content in the term structure of nominal interest rates for future inflation. Tests of the ability of the term structure to forecast future changes in the inflation rate are carried out for six major OECD countries using monthly...

This paper provides a synthesis of what is known about the determinants of output growth based on studying microeconomic data sets. It starts with a summary of the theoretical explanations which help reconcile heterogeneous performance observed across establishments in the same sector. The...

In recent years the behaviour of the income velocity of money in major OECD economies has displayed considerable volatility for both narrow and broad monetary aggregates (Table 1). Velocity in a number of large OECD economies, for example, fell sharply in 1982. Most notably, declines in the...

Compliance with the structural budget surplus rule, which has been in place since 2001, has allowed the government to maintain a counter-cyclical fiscal stance in an environment of rising copper prices, while delivering a gradual reduction in public indebtedness. Monetary policy is conducted...

This working paper presents evidence on changes in income distribution and poverty in thirteen OECD countries over the two decades up to the first half of the 1990s. While country experience has been variable, income and poverty rose in most countries. Both earnings and capital and self...

This paper assesses Brazil’s regulatory framework and agencies for several network industries (electricity, oil and gas, and water and sanitation). Private investment can be encouraged by tackling regulatory uncertainty in many areas. To this end, recent initiatives include a new regulatory...

This paper examines the short-term distributional effects of a number of tax and labour market reforms in the euro area, drawing on simulations using a micro-founded dynamic general equilibrium model. A heterogeneous household sector with two groups of consumers is considered. The first group...

While the German federal fiscal system has been successful in promoting a high standard of living even in regions whose economic capacity is low, tensions have emerged. <I>Firstly</I>, it has been difficult to ensure a sustainable fiscal policy, and the size of the overall deficit makes it difficult...</i>