The effect of pension systems on public and private saving is important - savings are a crucial link between decisions today and living standards tomorrow. This paper, following a brief overview of pension systems in some OECD countries, reviews the empirical literature. Two important questions...

This paper presents marginal effective tax rates (METRs) for a number of physical and intangible assets and for a number of funding sources. The assets include machinery, buildings, inventories, investments in short-lived R&D (that is, investments whose returns last only a few years) and in...

This paper retraces the Communities external liberalisation efforts, and discusses, where relevant, the repercussions of internal liberalisation on foreign competitors. The aim of the paper is to clarify, and when feasible, to quantify the economic effects of the EU’s trade policies. To this...

In this paper, the authors analyse the role of asset market prices in the formation of monetary policy with particular reference to equity markets, a concern for policy makers in the late 1990s. While asset prices have potentially valuable supplementary information for monetary policy makers,...

As more countries experience falling structural unemployment, the evidence is mounting that, implemented comprehensively, the OECD Jobs Strategy represents an effective response to countries’ labour market problems. That is the key conclusion to emerge now that the Economic and Development...

The separability between efficiency and equity is an underlying assumption in most computable general equilibrium (CGE) models used to assess the costs of carbon abatement. Chichilnisky and Heal (1994) have generated a debate on both the analytical correctness of this hypothesis as well as its...

Using overlapping generations (OLG) models calibrated on seven OECD countries -- the United States, Japan, France, Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom and Sweden -- the authors investigate the macroeconomic impact of possible pension reform strategies as populations age. Simulations include a...

This working paper presents evidence on changes in income distribution and poverty in thirteen OECD countries over the two decades up to the first half of the 1990s. While country experience has been variable, income and poverty rose in most countries. Both earnings and capital and self...