Leaving EMU would create great legal uncertainty and costly litigation and would hence involve extremely high costs for a country that has fully been euronized. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that these costs are not high enough to eliminate fully the risk of monetary disintegration in Europe....

In light of the recent financial crises in the emerging markets, the coming-into-force of the financial services agreement under the GATS has been considered a success. While the agreement provides for little new liberalization but rather formalizes the status quo, it was feared that governments...

In this paper we focus on a particular data requirement of tax-benefit microsimulation models in the UK: micro-data on both incomes and expenditures. Tax-benefit models estimate the revenue and distributional effects of changes in personal tax and social security policy. They require detailed...

This document is intended as a practical guide for researchers using the Grade Correspondence Analysis (GCA) method of clustering data. The purpose of the guide is to highlight facets of GCA that are not immediately apparent or covered in other publications, and to ensure that all aspects of GCA...

Traditionally, Budget analysis consists of calculation of the "overnight" effects on particular families. Our analysis departs from this by using survey data, representative of the actual population, which allows us to assess the overall distributional effects. We capture the diverse range of...

The new Labour Government in Britain has made the reduction of child poverty one of its central objectives. An earlier paper described the specific initiatives involved in Labourís approach and weighed them up in terms of their potential impact (Piachaud and Sutherland, 2000). This paper -...

This paper explores the short-term financial implications of abolishing earnings replacement social security benefits and relying on the system of means tested benefits to replace them.

This paper uses a structural vector autoregression to examine differences in demand and supply shocks and the response to these shocks between EMU member countries and three other groups of countries. The first group includes non-EMU EU countries, the second group EFTA countries and the third...

This paper investigates the stability of the German money supply focusing on the period 1991 - 1998. It is shown that the standard ARIMA-Transfer model approach in the literature needs to be augmented by a cointegration term to adequately model the dynamics of money supply in Germany. Additional...