The Netherlands, as other OECD countries, faces the challenge of providing high quality health and long-term care services to an ageing population in a cost-efficient manner. In the health care sector, reforms have aimed at introducing more competition. Despite major changes and some positive...

Significant labour market mismatches and insufficient mobility penalise employment and productivity. Mismatches have above all a skills dimension, with an excess of low-skilled workers and a possible lack of skilled workers in certain domains. Reducing the high tax wedge on low salaries and...

Owing to slow growth and a relatively weak fiscal position, Portugal’s public debt had been rising for almost a decade when the global crisis struck, sharply increasing the deficit. The loss of confidence in Portuguese and other euro area sovereign bonds required international financial...

This paper illustrates possible trade-offs between two different fiscal consolidation strategies in Portugal: sticking to the nominal fiscal targets in the EU-IMF programme or allowing automatic stabilisers to work, while sticking to the structural primary deficit targets implied by the...

This paper evaluates short-term forecasts of real GDP in the Euro area derived from the CESifo Economic Climate indicator (WES) in terms of forecast accuracy. We compare the forecast properties of the WES with those of monthly composite indicators. Considering the WES is interesting because (i)...

Ein Ziel der EZB ist es, die Preisstabilität in der Eurozone zu gewährleisten. Beim Streben nach Preisstabilität zielt die EZB darauf ab, Preissteigerungsraten von unter, aber nahe 2% sicherzustellen. Mit dieser quantitativen Definition will die EZB eine Verankerung der Inflationserwartungen...