Trends in public finance : insights from a new detailed dataset

To investigate how public finances could best be designed to promote long-run growth and address inequality, it is essential to have comprehensive, cross-country comparable data on government spending and revenues, along with structural and policy indicators. By identifying key variables of public finance across as many OECD countries as possible, and with a time series element to allow for longitudinal analysis, the OECD Public Finance Dataset provides a detailed data set to contribute to an evidence-based debate on shaping growth-enhancing and equality-promoting fiscal policies. Characteristics of both country groupings and individual country public finance profiles are highlighted as examples of the potential of these data to provide policy insights.