This study examines reforms of public expenditure in industrialised countries over the past two decades. We distinguish ambitious and timid reformers and analyse in detail reform experiences in eight case studies of ambitious reform episodes. We find that ambitious reform countries reduce...

This paper attempts to measure the direct effects of the Maastricht criteria and the Stability Pact on growth and unemployment in the EU countries, and covers the period 1980-2001. The evidence from a panel empirical analysis suggests that growth was negatively influenced by the imposition of...

The economic crisis of 2001-2002 in Argentina caused a large increase in unemployment. Policy responses have been imperfect. This paper discusses the roots and character of the crisis, the policies implemented to address the resulting social situation, and the quality of early warning indicators...

The intertemporal relationship between oil revenues, real government spending and real output over the oil cycle is investigated for the case of Angola, the second largest oil producer in Sub-Saharan Africa. The results of a trivariate VAR, impulse response functions, and variance decomposition...

With a sluggish economy, high unemployment, and unprecedented deficit spending, growing the economy and curbing federal spending are top priorities in Washington. A now-popular target for reform is regulation, which even President Obama claims to have "stifled innovation" and to have had "a...

This paper investigates the long-run effects of public debt and infl ation on economic growth. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop a cross-sectionally augmented distributed lag (CS-DL) approach to the estimation of long-run effects in dynamic...

This paper adds to the literature on tax policy and economic growth by examining the effects of tax cuts on labor and capital within an endogenous growth model with public capital and elastic labor supply. The impact of tax cuts on growth rates and government revenues is shown to vary...

Despite the launch of a new strategy for growth in Europe (the Europe 2020 strategy) and the ongoing efforts to design a new international financial architecture, prospects for an economic recovery of Europe remain dim. Public deficits and debts will have to be reduced at a faster pace, with...