 Strategic fiscal policies in Europe: Why does the labour wedge matter?Francois Langot and Matthieu Lemoine European Economic Review, 2017, vol. 91, issue C, 15-29 Abstract: Most European countries suffer from a structural weakness in employment and competitiveness. Can an optimal tax system reinforce European countries in this respect? In this paper, we show that fiscal competition can be a welfare improving second best solution if the labour wedge is sufficiently large. Indeed, a sufficiently large labour wedge calls for an expansion of the production set in both countries, thus increasing global opportunities. For a small labour wedge, this would not be the case, because the terms-of-trade externality would call for a fiscal policy that exacerbates a non-cooperative behaviour between countries. In a two-country world, we show that the symmetric Nash equilibrium can be Pareto-efficient, if employment subsidies are financed by a consumption tax. This is not the case when the former are financed by tariffs. Keywords: Optimal taxation; International trade; Labour wedge; General equilibrium model (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:91:y:2017:i:c:p:15-29 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2016.09.005 Access Statistics for this article European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier |
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