We study the role of tax share and transparency of governance on growth and stagnation. A local government maximizes its private benefits using two activities. The first one consists of providing local public goods that help local firms to increase profits, thus enlarging tax revenue. The second...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on what makes German regions grow. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal...

This paper carries out an overview of the recent history of privatisation in Spain. At this point, the paper focuses on the analysis of the economic, financial and political objectives pursued by successive Spanish Administrations. It is argued that privatisation policy has been inconsistent...

The paper considers governments' public procurement decision as a way of influencing industry structure. In a federation in which capital is mobile and capital taxation is harmonized, a home bias in public procurement can potentially be explained as an effort to increase the capital intensity of...

Trade reforms in transition economies are analyzed in a model of trade and vertical product differentiation. We first show that trade liberalization in transition economies reduces the local firm's output and raises the prices of all variants. Second, we find that neither free trade nor the...

Current policy initiatives taken by the EU and the OECD aim at abolishing preferential corporate tax regimes. This note extends Keen's (2001) analysis of symmetric capital tax competition under preferential (or discriminatory) and non-discriminatory tax regimes to allow for countries of...

This paper reports the results of a survey among private sector economists about credibility and transparency of central banks. In line with the survey of Alan Blinder among central bankers, we asked participants in Ifo's World Economic Survey to answer questions on the importance and...

Preparations are underway to revise national accounting to implement actuarial recording of pension liabilities for corporations and government as an employer. This paper extends this to unfunded public pensions with the help of "implicit tax" in pension contributions. The clearest advantages of...

This paper estimates Nash-type fiscal reaction functions for European governments competing for revenue from diesel excises. It appears that European governments strategically set their excise levels by responding to their neighbors' tax rates. This provides evidence for the presence of tax...

This paper presents a reappraisal of unemployment movements in the European Union. Our analysis is based on the chain reaction theory of unemployment, which focuses on (a) the interaction among labor market adjustment processes, (b) the interplay between these adjustment processes and the...