The European Union has recently proposed sectoral tax differentiation as a policy to fight unemployment. The member countries are allowed to reduce the VAT rates on goods and services that are particularly labor intensive and price elastic. The paper provides a theoretical analysis of the...

The paper examines policy externalities between imperfectly competitive open economies where unemployment prevails in general equilibrium. We develop a two-country and two-sector model with monopolistic competition in the goods market and wage bargaining in the labor market. Policy externalities...

The European Union has recently proposed sectoral tax differentiatio as a policy to fight unemployment. The member countries are allowed to reduce the VAT rates on goods and services that are particularly labor intensive and price elastic. The paper provides a theoretical analysis of the effects...