In this article, we take account of an evaluation of the short- and medium-term effects of the transmission mechanism of fiscal policy in EU and OECD countries and their dependence on the state of the economy and fiscal behaviour. Our findings indicate that (i) across EU member states the impact of government spending on economic performance is larger in the accession than in core member states, (ii) since the onset of the economic/financial crisis the government spending multipliers have become larger in both core and accession EU member states, and (iii) a comparison with fiscal responses in the OECD countries shows robustness of our estimates. The conclusion implies that the austerity measures present a substantial drag for economic activity in accession EU countries. Thus, we may state that not considering the fiscal behaviour and state of the economy gives misleading fiscal multiplier effects, which in turn lead to the adoption of inappropriate fiscal measures that even worsen a country’s economic situation.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4993198
The National Transfer Accounts (NTA) has recently been developed to measure economic flows across age groups. In this article, we extend the NTA for Slovenia by including the value of unpaid household production. Based on time-use data, we discover that people in Slovenia spent even more time on household production than on paid work, which emphasizes the necessity of including household production in the NTA analysis. We find that there are large net transfers of household production flowing from adults to children, and to a lesser extent also to the elderly. We calculate unpaid production separately for both genders, and discover that females provide much more unpaid production and total productive work than males. In addition, they face a much more intensive “rush hour of life” than males. We expect that similar patterns may be found in other post-Communist countries where equalizing labour force participation by gender was central to the Communist agenda, but no similar efforts were undertaken to equalize household work burdens.
COBISS.SI-ID: 23066342
Paper compares several types of economic dependency ratios for a selection of European countries. These dependency ratios take into account not only the demographic structure of the population, but also the differences in age specific economic behaviour such as labour market activity, income and consumption as well as age-specific public transfers. In selected simulations the patterns of age-specific economic behaviour and transfers are combined with population projections. It is shown that in all countries population ageing would lead to a pronounced increase in dependency ratios if present age-specific patterns were not to change. The analysis of cross-country differences in economic dependency demonstrates that these differences are driven by both differences in age-specific economic behaviour and in the age composition of the populations. The choice of which dependency ratio to use in a specific policy context is determined by the nature of the question to be answered. The comparison of various dependency ratios across countries gives insights into which strategies might be effective in mitigating the expected increase in economic dependency due to demographic change.
COBISS.SI-ID: 23560166