Towards the end of 2009, the world economy was recovering from its deepest recession since the end of World War II. Most countries around the world took resort to fiscal policy in order to foster this recovery. In this paper, we first discuss the pros and cons of discretionary fiscal policy from...

The current debt crisis has shed light on the importance of accurate fiscal forecasts. In particular, the accuracy of revenue forecasts is central since they set the limit within which expenditure should remain in order to reach fiscal balance. Therefore, forecasting tax revenue accurately is a...

In this study, we investigate whether population aging influences employment shares in different economic sectors. To this end, we employ dynamic panel data analysis. Our unbalanced data set comprises 54 countries and extends to a maximum time period from 1970 till 2004. Our results suggest that...

This paper suggests a novel approach to pre-selection of the component series of the diffusion index based on their individual forecasting performance. It is shown that this targeted selection allows substantially improving the forecasting ability compared to the diffusion index models that are...

This paper investigates the income convergence among Russian regions in the period 1998-2006. It makes two major contributions to rather extensive literature on the regional convergence in Russia. First, it identifies spatial regimes using the exploratory spatial data analysis. Second, it...