High expectations surrounded the two waves of eastward EU enlargement in 2004 and 2007, with the extension of the EU Internal Market being expected to deliver a substantial boost to economic growth in new and old member States alike. Indeed, considerable progress has been made, with existing...

Estonia gave up the exchange rate and monetary policy tools of macroeconomic management when it introduced its currency board in 1992. While the currency board arrangement served the country well during transition in the 1990s, it offers limited flexibility to implement policies that would ease...

Key indicators show Germany belonging to the countries in the OECD with strong innovation activity even though some weakening in Germany’s position relative to other OECD countries has occurred recently. While the redirection of resources towards unification-related spending as well as low...

In 2008, the Czech government implemented a major overhaul of the personal income tax (PIT), replacing the previous progressive rate schedule with a single 15% rate levied on an enlarged base. This was accompanied by significant changes to the corporate income tax (CIT) and an increase in the...

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,...

In this paper, we test whether the growth experience of a sample of OECD countries over the past three decades is more consistent with the human-capital augmented Solow model of exogenous growth, or with an endogenous growth model à la Uzawa-Lucas with constant returns to scale to “broad”...

This paper uses a stratified sample of firms across OECD economies over the period 1996-2004 to analyse the effects of corporate taxes on productivity and investment. Applying a differences-in-differences estimation strategy which exploits differential effects of corporate taxes on firms with...

This paper relates diverging productivity performances across OECD countries over the past fifteen years to differences in the stringency of regulations in the product market. We first summarize industry-level evidence linking these diverging patterns to delays in service markets reforms in the...