Une concurrence vigoureuse sur le marché des produits constitue un élément essentiel pour assurer une croissance économique dynamique. Cette étude examine les conditions de la concurrence en liaison avec les performances économiques de la Suisse, dont la croissance a été plus faible que...

The recent reform of the Stability and Growth Pact provides more leeway for EU governments to temporarily breach the 3% deficit limit if this facilitates the implementation of initially expensive reforms. But the implementation of this principle is not obvious as budgets would need to specify...

Switzerland is a highly decentralised country with large spending and revenue-raising powers devolved to cantons and municipalities. The federal system, in combination with an extensive use of direct democracy, has contributed to keep public spending at a relatively low level in international...

In recent years the euro area has shown less resilience to the negative and largely OECD-wide common shocks than the English-speaking countries, but most of the smaller euro area countries have fared better than the large ones. This paper reviews policy issues that are important in fostering a...

This paper reviews first the fiscal policy recommendations by the EU, the IMF and the OECD for Finland, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. All these countries had inflation above the euro area average in early 2001, some by a considerable margin. The fiscal policy...

The structural rate of unemployment and associated non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (the NAIRU) are of major importance to the analysis of macro and structural economic developments, although in practice these concepts are not well defined and there is considerable uncertainty and...

This paper describes a number of alternative medium-term scenarios for the OECD economies and related policy stimulations using the OECD world model INTERLINK. The starting point of the analysis is a reference scenario to 2000 featuring a general recovery of the OECD economies to steady state...

This paper examines the possible short- and medium-term macroeconomic consequences of changes in trend factor productivity growth for the major OECD economies. The analysis includes a range of different scenarios based on the recently re-estimated OECD INTERLINK model, in particular its...

This paper examines the likely influence of recent stock market fluctuations on major OECD economies, focusing on wealth effects and consumption. After reviewing the relevant theoretical framework and available empirical evidence, consumption functions are estimated for the US including the...

This study was prepared in the Economics Department as a contribution to the Organisation -wide study of the economic consequences of population ageing. It presents a number of long-term scenarios illustrating the likely domestic and international macroeconomic effects of ageing across the OECD...