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Affordable Rental Housing: Making It Part of Europe’s Recovery
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 97

Affordable Rental Housing: Making It Part of Europe’s Recovery

Many European economies have faced pressure from rental housing affordability that has widened social and economic divergence. While significant country and regional differences exist, this departmental paper finds that in many advanced European economies a large and rising share of low-income renters, the young, and those living in cities is overburdened. In several locations, middle-income groups also increasingly face rental affordability issues.

Capital Markets, COVID-19 and Policy Measures
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 36

Capital Markets, COVID-19 and Policy Measures

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated policy responses triggered a historically large wave of capital reallocation between markets and asset classes. Using high-frequency country-level data, this paper examines if and how the number of COVID cases, the stringency of the lockdown, and the fiscal and monetary policy response determined the dynamics of portfolio flows. Despite more dominant global factors, we find that these domestic factors played an important role, particularly for emerging markets and bond flows, contributing to a global wave of reallocation to safer asset classes. Our results indicate that rising domestic COVID cases had a strong positive effect on portfolio flows, which res...

Making Public Debt Public—Ongoing Initiatives and Reform Options
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 46

Making Public Debt Public—Ongoing Initiatives and Reform Options

The paper develops and assesses options to improve public debt transparency. It first makes the case, both conceptually and empirically, for greater public debt transparency. To guide the development and assessment of options, it examines the factors hindering transparency, including capacity and governance gaps, and borrower and creditor incentives. The paper then provides a high-level overview of existing initiatives to improve public debt transparency, identifying priorities for progress and policy gaps. Next, it presents and analyzes the merits of a range of options to improve public debt transparency, drawn from reform proposals gaining prominence in policymaking circles while reflecting Fund policy priorities. The IMF could contribute to these reforms with actions within its mandate but would need significant additional resources.

Morocco
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 44

Morocco

This Selected Issues paper examines the distributional effects of tax reforms in Morocco. Overall, the performance of Morocco’s tax system is satisfactory, but there is scope to strengthen it and make it more equitable and less distortive. Morocco would benefit from a comprehensive and well explained tax reform strategy aiming to reduce inequality and boost growth. For this, a recommended tax reform package should combine several key components, for example, reducing tax exemptions, raising property tax, and lowering corporate tax rates. At the same time, the targeting of social programs should be strengthened. Such a reform approach would protect the most vulnerable and help broaden the tax base, remove tax distortions, and better share the tax burden.

Structural Reforms and Labor Reallocation: A Cross-Country Analysis
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 41

Structural Reforms and Labor Reallocation: A Cross-Country Analysis

Institutional and market frictions impose costs on the reallocation of labor from low to high productivity sectors, leading to suboptimal allocations and a loss in aggregate labor productivity. Using cross-country sector-level data, we use a dynamic panel error correction model to compute the speed of sectoral labor adjustment, as well as the contribution of structural reforms in governance, labor and product markets, trade and openness, and the financial sector to lowering the costs of labor reallocation. We find that, on average, sectoral employment shares converge towards equilibrium allocations, closing about 13.7 percent of labor productivity gaps each year; this speed of labor adjustment varies across sectors and income groups. On structural reforms, we find a significant association between more efficient labor reallocation and financial market liberalization, less bureaucracy, strong judicial and regulatory environment, trade liberalization, better education and more flexible labor and product markets.

Making Public Debt Public—Ongoing Initiatives and Reform Options—Background Paper
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 17

Making Public Debt Public—Ongoing Initiatives and Reform Options—Background Paper

This Background Paper provides technical information to accompany the main paper “Making Public Debt Public: Ongoing Initiatives and Reform Options”. It provides further empirical evidence of benefits of public debt transparency and elaborates on two elements that can be used to enhance it: (i) sound practices in public debt management and (ii) available international data standards and publicly available debt databases.

Electric Vehicles, Tax Incentives and Emissions: Evidence from Norway
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 25

Electric Vehicles, Tax Incentives and Emissions: Evidence from Norway

This paper empirically estimates the effects of electric vehicles (EVs) on passenger car emissions to inform the design of policies that encourage EV purchases in Norway. We use exceptionally rich data on the universe of cars and households from Norway, which has a very high share of EVs, thanks to generous tax incentives and other policies. Our estimates suggest that household-level emission savings from the purchase of additional EVs are limited, resulting in high implicit abatement costs of Norway’s tax incentives relative to emission savings. However, the estimated emission savings are much larger if EVs replace the dirtiest cars. Norway’s experience may also help inform similar policies in other countries as they ramp up their own national climate mitigation strategies.

Norway: Selected Issues
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 14

Norway: Selected Issues

Selected Issues

Iceland
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 34

Iceland

Iceland: Selected Issues

United Kingdom
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 68

United Kingdom

This Selected Issues paper estimates the long-run economic impact of Brexit on the United Kingdom under two distinct assumptions for the post-Brexit relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union. These illustrative scenarios entail different degrees of higher trade costs, a more restricted European Union migration regime and reduced foreign inward investment. A standard multicountry and multisector computable general equilibrium model is used to quantify the impact of higher trade barriers. There is substantial sectoral heterogeneity in the impact, and regions with higher concentrations of the more affected sectors are likely to confront greater losses. The empirical analysis suggests the speed of sectoral labor relocation across sectors has been relatively low in the UK. Irrespective of these empirical estimates, policies, such as retraining, would be critical to facilitate faster adjustment of the economy to the post-Brexit equilibrium thereby helping to minimize the associated costs to individuals and in aggregate.