Between 2000 and 2008 Slovakia grew by almost 6% per year in per capita terms. As a result, Slovakia substantially narrowed the economic gap that separated it from more developed western European countries: Slovak GDP per capita increased from 43% of the EU-15 average in 2000 to 64% in 2008. The...

This country study finds that Poland stands at a crossroads and explores what mix of macroeconomic and structural policies would be most efficient in lifting the Polish economy to a new equilibrium, placing it on a fast-convergence track. Public finance reform, deepening competitiveness and...

In 2003, the ECOFIN Council gave the Economic Policy Committee (EPC) a mandate to produce a new set of long-run budgetary projections for all twenty-five Member States covering pensions, health care, long-term care, education, unemployment transfers and, if possible, contributions to...

This report examines recent labour market developments from a macroeconomic perspective, with the aim of shedding light on the interaction of employment trends with others macroeconomic developments such as GDP and productivity growth in 2004. It presents in a comprehensive way the main findings...

The objective of this literature review is to determine how the literature can inform policy makers on the choice of policy instruments. Does the empirical and theoretical literature unambiguously support, from an efficiency perspective, the case for liberalization? As a corollary, to what...

This paper develops an approach to measure the uncertainty surrounding expected GDP growth that prevails in the economy. This is accomplished by making use of consensus forecasts of GDP growth and by studying the properties of distributions of forecasted euro area GDP growth. A euro area...

This paper surveys tools to analyse the macroeconomic impact of structural reforms, with a focus on two general approaches: (i) econometric estimates, linking indicators of policy change to macroeconomic outcomes, and (ii) structural macroeconomic models simulating the effect of reforms on...

This paper takes stock of the progress achieved by the ten Central and Eastern European countries, which entered the EU in 2004 and 2007, in terms of their real and nominal economic convergence visà- vis the twelve EU Member States which were part of the euro area in 2004. It thus offers a...