The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

Despite performing very positively on some key macroeconomic indicators in recent years, the German economy is in grave disequilibrium if the high current account surplus is included in the analysis. The paper scrutinises the evolution of Germany's external surplus since the inception of the...

This paper develops a framework for studying the interactions between labour unions, fiscal policy, monetary policy and monopolistically competitive firms. The framework is used to investigate the effects of labour taxes, the replacement ratio, labour market institutions and monetary...

Despite performing very positively on some key macroeconomic indicators in recent years, the German economy is in grave disequilibrium if the high current account surplus is included in the analysis. The paper scrutinises the evolution of Germany's external surplus since the inception of the...

This paper examines the relation between the two, may be the most pressing, phenomena of the world economy: competitiveness and development. Of course both can be interpreted in several ways, but the most operative way is to consider competitivenes by the methodology of the World Economic...

This article considers the necessity of raising the competitiveness of agriculture in Russian Federation by means of improving marketing relationships in terms of entering Russia into WTO. It offers a number of ways of improvement.

Dual inflation takes place when prices increases in non-tradable goods are higher than those of tradable goods. In this paper, we develop a model where public spending has a positive externality on the production of those sectors. The main results suggested by the paper are the following: 1)An...

Since the beginning of this decade, which corresponds to the processes of an accelerated political, social and economic opening to the European and global environment, the Republic of Croatia has become aware of the need for deep reforms to enable the creation of permanently sustained success of...

Turkey recovered swiftly from the global financial crisis but sizeable macroeconomic imbalances arose in the process. High consumer price inflation and a wide current account deficit are sources of vulnerability. Even though below-potential growth helps rebalancing and disinflation, these...