Mirela Keuschnigg

Public Debt and Generational Balance in Austria

Based on Austrias fiscal stance in 1995, wecompute the generational accounts for currently living as well as future generations.The results reveal the existence of an intergenerational imbalance in favor of currentlyliving generations. Total public sector liabilities may be more than five times as high asthe officially recorded level of public debt. Without any action, future generations would facelife-time net taxes that are about 65 percent higher than the tax burden of a current newborn.If the government could fully and permanently retain the expenditure cutting andrevenue raising effects of the 1996 fiscal consolidation package and the 1997 pension reform,then it might be able to significantly reduce the intergenerational liabilities. However,enacting both the recent tax reform 2000 and the reform of the family support scheme wouldincrease again the fiscal imbalance and intergenerational bias of fiscal policy in Austria.

Aging, Labor Markets, and Pension Reform in Austria

This paper investigates the dynamic consequences of demographic change and various pension reform scenarios for Austria. The analysis is based on a computable overlapping generations model with life-cycle labor supply, savings, and search unemployment. The public sector is decomposed into general government and an unfunded pension system with a tax benefit linkage. Our quantitative analysis considers several pension reform scenarios on top of the demographic transition in an aging society. We find that lowering the pension replacement rate and increasing the retirement age can have strong labor market effects. They strengthen labor supply both in terms of job search intensity, leading to lower unemployment rates, and hours worked.

The German Perspective on Eastern EU Enlargement

Discusses the German perspective on eastern European Union (EU) expansion. Accounts on the EU expansion of original single market state; Evaluation on the consequences of EU enlargement; Expectation on the benefits and costs of enlargement distribution across present EU member countries.

Aging and the Financing of Social Security in Switzerland

Demographic projections forecast a doubling of the dependency ratio until 2050 as well as an increase of 10% in population due to longer life expectancy in Switzerland. To quantify the effects on social security and public finances, we use a computational overlapping generations model with five margins of labor supply: labor market participation, hours worked, job search, retirement, and on-the-job training. Starting with a passive fiscal strategy, we find that aging might reduce per capita income by 20 percent and necessitate a long-run increase of wage taxes and social security contributions by 21 percentage points. A comprehensive reform package, including an increase in the effective retirement age to 68 years and several other measures, may limit the tax increases to 4 percentage points of value added tax and reduce the decline of per capita income to less than 6%.

Economic Aging and Demographic Change

This paper presents a generalized model of overlapping generations with economic aging of households. Economic age is defined as a set of personal attributes such as earnings potential and tastes that are characteristic of a persons position in the life-cycle. We separate the concepts of economic age and time since birth in assuming only a small number of different states of age. Agents sharing the same economic characteristics are aggregated analytically to a low number of age groups. The model thus allows for a very parsimonious approximation of life-cycle differences in earnings, wealth and consumption. As an illustration, we quantitatively apply the model to study the impact of demographic change.

Eine Unternehmenssteuerreform für Deutschland

The authors of this book seek to simulate the transition from the present system of corporate taxation to a system of downstream taxation in order to reach a better understanding of the effects of redistribution caused by a tax reform during the transition from the old to the new long-term equilibrium. (Published in German.)