This paper examines the impact of temporal variation in labour market institutions and other structural factors on unemployment in Europe. These include the influence of trade unions, social security benefits, employment security, mismatch between job seekers and vacancies, the minimum wage and...

We investigate the usefulness of the European Commission confidence indicators for forecasting real GDP growth rates in the short run is investigated in selected euro area countries (Belgium, Spain, Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands) which account for almost 90% of the euro area. A...

The objective of this paper is to estimate time variant shadow prices for CO2, SOx, NOx and PM10 in 19 OECD countries over the period 1990-2008 relying on an output distance function approach. Shadow prices for pollutants are found to vary widely across countries, depending on national...

This paper seeks to estimate the effect on multifactor productivity (MFP) of air pollution in 7 ASEAN economies (Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) and China, valuing pollution through shadow price estimates for CO2, SOx, NOx and PM10 derived from an...

Now that pollution is reaching worrisome levels in some countries and at the global level, there is a growing consensus that it needs to be explicitly considered as a by-product of the production process and incorporated in economic decisions. But this is not easy in the absence of markets and...

Multifactor productivity (MFP) is increasingly used in economic policy, not least to compute potential output. Most measures are based on a standard production function combining labour and capital, but do not incorporate the negative by-products of the production process such as air pollution...

This paper reviews and assesses in terms of availability, reliability and transparency existing policy and outcome indicators that have been found to be linked both directly and indirectly to economic growth and living standards. Indicators aiming at capturing the political and social situation...

The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of financial crises on potential output. For this purpose a univariate autoregressive growth equation is estimated on an unbalanced panel of OECD countries over the period 1960 to 2007. Our results suggest that the occurrence of a financial crisis...

The objective of this paper is to develop a short-term indicator-based model to predict quarterly GDP in Canada by efficiently exploiting all available monthly information. To this aim, monthly forecasting equations are estimated using the GDP series published every month by Statistics Canada as...