Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Pension Reforms in Europe: How Far Have We Come and Gone?
In the past few decades, a myriad of reforms in Europe have had a significant impact on the way and extent to which public pensions provide retirement income. This departmental paper takes stock of where European pension systems stand and assesses their key characteristics. We present a novel measure of the balance between lifetime benefits and contributions—the Proportionality Measure—to examine pension systems’ long-term sustainability, fairness, and intergenerational equity
Republic of Moldova: Selected Issues
Selected Issues
Republic of Moldova
This paper discusses Republic of Moldova’s Fourth and Fifth Reviews Under the Extended Credit Facility and Extended Fund Facility Arrangements, Completion of the Inflation Consultation, and Request for Extension of the Arrangements and Rephasing of Access. The Moldovan authorities have taken decisive corrective measures to bring the Fund supported program back on track and to achieve its objectives of ensuring macroeconomic stability and advancing reforms. Going forward, it is critical that the authorities continue to pursue prudent policies and structural reforms aimed at strengthening the financial sector, maintaining fiscal sustainability, and creating space for social and infrastructure spending. Policies remain focused on cleansing the financial sector, ensuring growth friendly fiscal policy, and enhancing transparency in the energy sector. The authorities are committed to completing the rehabilitation of the banking system, addressing vulnerabilities in the non-bank sector, promoting predictable energy tariff setting, and maintaining fiscal sustainability to preserve space for social and infrastructure spending.
Ukraine
The Ukrainian authorities have been able to restore macro-economic stability and growth following the severe economic crisis of 2014–15. However, efforts to create a more dynamic, open, and competitive economy have fallen short of expectations, and the economy still faces important challenges. Investment, particularly foreign direct investment, is held back by a difficult business environment, while large numbers of worker seek job opportunities abroad as economic growth is too low for incomes to noticeably close the gap with regional peers. Reserves have recovered, but remain relatively low, while the economy is still vulnerable to shocks.
A Central Fiscal Stabilization Capacity for the Euro Area
This note outlines a concrete proposal for a euro area central fiscal capacity (CFC) that could help smooth both country-specific and common shocks. Specifically, it proposes a macroeconomic stabilization fund financed by annual contributions from countries that are used to build up assets in good times and make transfers to countries in bad times, as well as a borrowing capacity in case an exceptionally large shock exhausts the fund’s assets. To address moral hazard risks, transfers from the CFC—beyond a country’s own net contributions—would be conditional on compliance with the EU fiscal rules. The note also discusses several features aimed at avoiding permanent transfers between countries and making the CFC function as automatically as possible—to limit the scope for disputes over its operation—both of which are important points to make it politically acceptable.
The Nexus Between Public Enterprise Governance, Financial Performance, and Macroeconomic Vulnerabilities: An Application to Moldova
Strong governance frameworks for public enterprises have long been an anchor of stability and efficiency underpinning their financial operations and performance. Cross-country experiences with the adoption of robust legal, regulatory and institutional arrangements—in line with international best practices— proved critical in reducing well-known risks and vulnerabilities from such companies, clarifying the role of the state, improving the management of state assets, and ensuring a level playing field for the private sector to prosper. Moldova’s large public enterprise sector of over 900 companies faces elevated risks that amplify fiscal and macroeconomic vulnerabilities and undermine market competition, productivity, and private investment. Moldova stands to greatly benefit from strengthening its public corporate governance regime to put its public enterprises on a stronger footing, address vulnerabilities, and improve market structure.
Ukraine: First Review Under the Stand-By Arrangement, Requests for Extension and Rephasing of Access of the Arrangement, Waivers of Nonobservance of a Performance Criterion, Financing Assurances Review, and Monetary Policy Consultation-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Ukraine
After a number of critical setbacks and delays in the 16 months since program approval, the authorities have taken important corrective actions to address shocks to program objectives. Early tension around the authorities’ commitment to uphold the independence of the National Bank of Ukraine required a pause to assess policy continuity and to determine possible corrective actions. A prior action for this review and new commitments by the authorities provide a way forward in protecting a key policy pillar under the program. Similarly, adverse Constitutional Court rulings challenged the anticorruption framework in fundamental ways that required restoring its effectiveness before the review could proceed. In a push to make progress on delayed structural benchmarks, the authorities have recently met seven of the nine structural benchmarks set at the time of the program request.
Advances in Computational Intelligence
This two-volume set LNCS 9094 and LNCS 9095 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 13th International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, IWANN 2015, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in June 2013. The 99 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 195 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on brain-computer interfaces: applications and tele-services; multi-robot systems: applications and theory (MRSAT); video and image processing; transfer learning; structures, algorithms and methods in artificial intelligence; interactive and cognitive environments; mathematical and theoretical methods in fuzzy systems; pattern recognition; embedded intelligent systems; expert systems; advances in computational intelligence; and applications of computational intelligence.
Output Losses in Europe During COVID-19: What Role for Policies?
We use a decomposition methodology to analyze the factors underlying the differentiated output losses of European countries in 2020. Our findings are fourfold: First, 2020 growth outcomes can be explained by differences in mobility, underlying growth trends, and pre-pandemic country fundamentals. Second, fiscal and monetary policies helped alleviate output losses during the pandemic in all European countries but to a varying extent. Third, shallower recessions in emerging market economies in Europe can be attributed to higher underlying growth and younger populations. Fourth, fiscal multipliers were higher in countries where above-the-line measures accounted for a larger share of the total fiscal package, the size of the total fiscal package was smaller, and inequality and informality were greater, as well as in countries with IMF-supported program during the pandemic.
