In recent years the euro area has shown less resilience to the negative and largely OECD-wide common shocks than the English-speaking countries, but most of the smaller euro area countries have fared better than the large ones. This paper reviews policy issues that are important in fostering a...

The recent reform of the Stability and Growth Pact provides more leeway for EU governments to temporarily breach the 3% deficit limit if this facilitates the implementation of initially expensive reforms. But the implementation of this principle is not obvious as budgets would need to specify...

This paper reviews first the fiscal policy recommendations by the EU, the IMF and the OECD for Finland, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. All these countries had inflation above the euro area average in early 2001, some by a considerable margin. The fiscal policy...

La présente étude commence par une revue du cadre conceptuel des différentes mesures du chômage structurel et des autres méthodes empiriques qui ont été utilisées pour estimer ces mesures. A partir de là, elle expose une méthode pour estimer, au moyen du filtre de Kalman, les NAIRU...

The paper first reviews the conceptual framework underlying different measures of structural unemployment as well as alternative empirical methods that have been used to provide estimates of them. Drawing on this review, it goes on to develop a method for estimating time-varying NAIRUs across a...

This study was prepared in the Economics Department as a contribution to the Organisation -wide study of the economic consequences of population ageing. It presents a number of long-term scenarios illustrating the likely domestic and international macroeconomic effects of ageing across the OECD...

Switzerland is a highly decentralised country with large spending and revenue-raising powers devolved to cantons and municipalities. The federal system, in combination with an extensive use of direct democracy, has contributed to keep public spending at a relatively low level in international...

This paper examines the possible short- and medium-term macroeconomic consequences of changes in trend factor productivity growth for the major OECD economies. The analysis includes a range of different scenarios based on the recently re-estimated OECD INTERLINK model, in particular its...

This paper describes a number of alternative medium-term scenarios for the OECD economies and related policy stimulations using the OECD world model INTERLINK. The starting point of the analysis is a reference scenario to 2000 featuring a general recovery of the OECD economies to steady state...

This paper reviews the methods used for estimating potential output in OECD countries and the use of the resulting output gaps for the calculation of structural budget balances. The "split time trend" method for estimating trend output that was previously used for calculating structural budget...