International economic integration increases exposure to external risk and intensifies domestic demands for social insurance through government programs. But international economic integration also reduces the ability of governments to respond to such pressure by rendering the tax base...

The paper provides a selective survey of methods and findings concerning the impact of tax and welfare policies on employment unemployment and economic growth in OECD countries. The paper examines a number of facets of tax and welfare policy and concludes that cross-country macroeconomic studies...

Equality can multiply due to the complementarity between wage determination and welfare spending. A more equal wage distribution fuels welfare generosity via political competition. A more generous welfare state fuels wage equality further via its support to weak groups in the labor market....

To shed light on the possible scarring effects from Covid-19, this paper studies the economic effects of five past pandemics using local projections on a sample of fifty-five countries over 1990-2019. The findings reveal that pandemics have detrimental medium-term effects on output,...

This paper evaluates whether debt relief and grants can boost social expenditures in low-income countries. It finds that declines in debt-service help raise social expenditures, but no relationship between grants and social expenditures. Moreover, since the mid-1980s, low-income countries have...