Nordhaus (2008) has developed a testing strategy for what he calls "Baumol's diseases", by which name he designates a number of by-products of structural change that are unwanted from an economic policy perspective. He finds that the U.S. economy is strongly affected by the "diseases". This...

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...