Suchergebnisse

This policy study asks to what extent large-scale public investment efforts could be a viable tool to provide the necessary infrastructure to break Europe's dependency on fossil fuel and carbon emissions more broadly. We estimate semi-structural VAR models for the EU27. These are used to study the impact of permanent as well as 5-year long public investment programmes. Three key findings emerge: First, government investment multipliers for the EU27 are large and range from 5.12 to 5.25. Second, debt-to-GDP ratios are likely to fall in response to the strong economic impulse generated by additional public investment spending. The study therefore classifies additional public investment spending in the EU27 as sustainable fiscal policy. Third, single country investment initiatives will likely lead to smaller economic expansions when compared to coordinated EU-wide investment, due to Europe's strong intra-member state trade flows. A coordinated approach to fiscal policy is thus substantially more effective not only when it comes to delivering network-dependent infrastructure (rail, grid) but also with respect to the economic stimulus it creates.

The European Union faces the twin crises of Covid-19 and climate change. Confronting both crises leads to an unprecedented demand on public resources which in turn leads to the question of how to raise the required funds a) without jeopardising a weak economy recovering from the pandemic and b) without undermining broad political support for climate action. This paper investigates the potential of a European net wealth tax to raise substantial revenues while supporting the economy and the consensus on climate action. To achieve this, household survey data from the European Central Bank (covering 22 EU countries) are analysed. To address the problem of under-reporting of wealth at the top of the distribution in survey data, a Pareto distribution is fitted to the right tail of the data and used to create an amended data set which also represents these missing rich, whose wealth goes unreported.

This policy study asks to what extent large-scale public investment efforts could be a viable tool to provide the necessary infrastructure to break Europe's dependency on fossil fuel and carbon emissions more broadly. We estimate semi-structural VAR models for the EU27. These are used to study the impact of permanent as well as 5-year long public investment programmes. Three key findings emerge: First, government investment multipliers for the EU27 are large and range from 5.12 to 5.25. Second, debt-to-GDP ratios are likely to fall in response to the strong economic impulse generated by additional public investment spending. The study therefore classifies additional public investment spending in the EU27 as sustainable fiscal policy. Third, single country investment initiatives will likely lead to smaller economic expansions when compared to coordinated EU-wide investment, due to Europe's strong intra-member state trade flows. A coordinated approach to fiscal policy is thus substantially more effective not only when it comes to delivering network-dependent infrastructure (rail, grid) but also with respect to the economic stimulus it creates.

The distribution of wealth in the European Union is heavily concentration at the top. The richest 1% of households hold a third of total aggregate net wealth while the poorest 50% of households hold less than 5% of total net wealth. The flipside of this strong concentration of wealth is the high revenue potential of wealth taxes. The estimates presented here suggest that a progressive tax on net wealth could generate revenues between 3% and 10.8% of GDP.

The European Green Deal (EGD) is the European Union's flagship strategy to tackle climate change. This policy study compares the ambition and scale of the EGD with the current relevant scientific literature. The goal is to assess whether the current proposals are capable of fulfilling the EU's commitment to limit global warming to 1.5°C in line with the Paris Agreement.