The trend rise of house prices in many OECD countries suggests weakness in the adjustment of supply to demand. This paper estimates long-term elasticities of housing supply to prices in OECD countries before exploring their drivers with a focus on policies. It finds a significant association...

Housing markets are large and highly volatile: they can thus create large macroeconomic risks. The current paper provides a bird’s eye view of where the housing markets of major OECD economies currently stand. It then uses the results of recently developed models to provide indications of...

Housing markets, which are large and subject to sharp swings, shape to a great extent countries’ exposure to economic crises and their capacity to recover from them. This paper analyses the transmission of housing-related shocks to the real economy: it investigates the role that policy plays...

For many years Greece has not made a systematic effort to redesign the whole tax system. Changes to taxation have been made in a piecemeal fashion, and many of them have led to a complex and non-transparent system, characterised by narrow bases and fairly high rates. There has also been a...

The Portuguese tax system has developed positively in the past decade. Following the 1989 tax reform, tax bases have been broadened and statutory tax rates lowered. The overall tax burden is not high by international comparison and the tax mix relies on the more neutral consumption taxes....

This paper investigates the design of tax structures to promote economic growth. It suggests a “tax and growth” ranking of taxes, confirming results from earlier literature but providing a more detailed disaggregation of taxes. Corporate taxes are found to be most harmful for growth,...

This paper considers the case for adjusting measures of the cyclically-adjusted fiscal balance for exceptional movements in the terms of trade for those countries where production of commodities is a substantial share of output. For such countries exceptional movements in commodity prices, such...

This working paper investigates the policy determinants of hours worked among employed individuals in OECD countries, focussing on the impact of taxation, working-time regulations, and other labour and product market policies. It explores the factors underlying cross-country differences in hours...

The Japanese tax system applies relatively low marginal tax rates on most economic activities which, in combination with moderate tax elasticities of the bases, indicate that the overall distortion from the tax system (the excess burden) is probably modest compared with other OECD countries....

The tax-to-GDP ratio rose steadily in most EU countries up to the late 1990s, largely reflecting a sustained expansion of public sector commitments to welfare provision. Since the late 1990s, many EU countries have cut tax rates. However, the tax burden in the EU area remains much higher than in...