OECD, (2016), “Taxing Wages 2016”, OECD Publishing, Paris, April This annual flagship publication provides details of taxes paid on wages in OECD countries. It covers: personal income taxes and employee contributions paid by employees, social security contributions and payroll taxes paid by employers, and cash benefits received by in-work families. It illustrates how these taxes and benefits are calculated in each member country and examines how they have an impact …Read More
Claeys, Grégory, Darva, Zsolt, (2016), “How to reform EU fiscal rules”, Bruegel, 12 April The austerity policies implemented in many European countries since 2010 have contributed to the poor economic recovery, raising questions about why EU budget rules failed to deliver both economic stabilisation and public debt sustainability. In theory the current rules could do a good job, but in practice they face major hurdles. A key indicator used in the current rules is the structural budget balance. This …Read More
Riso, Sara, (2016), “Avoiding The Quick Fix Approach To Solving Youth Unemployment”, Social Europe, 13 April A key priority for EU policy makers is to combat high levels of youth unemployment. Supporting young people to start a new business is increasingly regarded as a way to achieve this goal. And yet the understanding of what drives the success and failure of youth entrepreneurship policies remains incomplete. In a rush to deliver …Read More
Falkner, Gerda, (2016), “The EU’s current crisis and its policy effects: research design and comparative findings”, Journal of European Integration, 24 March The paper summarises a collaborative international research project comparing the impact of the ongoing conglomerate of crises in nine EU policies. All of them saw significant crisis-induced pressures and challenges. Beyond changes in discourse, the crisis-induced pressures have, in many areas, also triggered a rather sizable amount of policy …Read More
Di Comite, Francesco, Thisse, Jacques-François, Vandenbussche, Hylke, (2016), “Demand decomposition in trade: Quality and taste”, Voxeu, 12 April The trade literature has long focused on firms’ productivity as an explanation for export performance. But what about the demand side? This column looks at firms’ appeal in terms of quality and consumer taste. Using Belgian firm-level data, it suggests that tastes could account for 45% of the variation in export quantities across countries. Relevant …Read More
Van der Veer, Harmen, Otjes, Simon, (2016), “Can only Eurosceptics oppose austerity? How divisions over integration have replaced the left/right divide in the European Parliament”, LSE blogs/Europpblog, 12 April How do economic platforms interact with support for European integration?Harmen van der Veer and Simon Otjes write that the dynamics within the European Parliament have undergone a shift since the beginning of the Eurozone crisis. Whereas in previous periods the key divide in the …Read More
Van Parijs, Philippe, (2016), “Basic Income And Social Democracy”, Social Europe, 11 April The idea of an unconditional basic income is in fashion. From Finland to Switzerland, from San Francisco to Seoul, people talk about it as they have never done. Twice before, basic income was the object of a real public debate, albeit briefly and limited to one country at a time. In both episodes, the centre left played a …Read More
Demary, Markus, Hornik, Joanna, Watfe,Gibran, (2016), “SME Financing in the EU: Moving beyond one-size-fits-all”, Bruges European Economic Policy Briefings 40 / 2016, The proposal for a European Capital Markets Union (CMU) carries large potential economic benefits from enhancing the financing possibilities for Small and MediumSized Enterprises (SMEs). By deepening the capital markets and strengthening crossborder integration, the European Commission hopes to stimulate economic growth and boost employment. In this paper, we …Read More
Beetsma, Roel M.W.J., Debrun, Xavier, (2016), “Fiscal Councils: Rationale and Effectiveness”, IMF WP/16/86, April The paper discusses the effectiveness of independent fiscal institutions—or fiscal councils—in taming the deficit bias that emerged in the 1970s. After a review of the main theoretical arguments and recent trends about fiscal councils, we develop a stylized model showing how a fiscal council can effectively mitigate the deficit bias even though it has no direct lever on the …Read More
Haffert, Lukas, (2016), “Permanent Budget Surpluses as a Fiscal Regime“, MPIfG Discussion Paper 16/1, February This paper challenges the focus on budget deficits that permeates the literature on fiscal policy. It analyzes countries running budget surpluses and asks why some of them preserved these surpluses while others did not. Whereas several OECD members recorded surpluses for just a few years, balanced budgets became the norm in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, and …Read More
