The Broad Economic Policy Guidelines contain the answers of the European Commission and the governments of the EU-member countries to the European growth and employment problems. These guidelines have been the major EU-economic policy concept for around ten years now. They can be seen as a...

This paper examines the countercyclical policy options available to Latin American countries in the face of the current global economic crisis, concluding that most of the major countries in the region appear to possess the fiscal space (as measured by credible fiscal sustainability and debt...

This paper first reviews a number of stylised facts concerning OECD country business cycles over the past four decades. In general, the amplitude of business cycles has fallen, driven mainly by declining fluctuations of domestic demand. As a result, international divergencies of cyclical...

Recent contributions to the Variety of capitalism literature have argued that nonliberal economies should be expected to have less accommodating macroeconomic policies than Liberal Market Economies (LMEs). Using Time Series Cross Section data on 16 OECD countries between 1980 and 2002, we test...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of social protection systems in Europe and the US to provide (income) insurance against macro level shocks in terms of automatic stabilizers. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38% of a proportional income shock and 47% of an idiosyncratic...

Previously, Leontief input-output analysis was utilized to compare the recovery process of the U.S. and Britain, and "guessed" that of Germany. With the newfound availability of the German I/O table of 1936, the inter-industry structure can be more fully understood. The Japanese table was...