Offering a comprehensive model for the evolution of the European Community's monetary system and budget, this study outlines and discusses recent political decisions made by the Community and their implications for its future.

Despite its widely acknowledged contribution to global prosperity over the past half century, the movement toward further liberalization has increasingly been challenged. This collection of essays examine several key issues at the heart of the debate over the multilateral trading system.

In this period of economic uncertainty, tax scholars must examine income tax policy from a macroeconomic perspective. The standard lenses of efficiency and equity no longer suffice. To highlight the importance of the macroeconomic perspective, this Article demonstrates that most tax expenditures are procyclical, exacerbating the business cycle. Tax expenditures effectively offer government subsidies for certain activities, such as charitable giving or home purchases. Because these activities vary with the business cycle, tax expenditures are higher at business cycle peaks than at business cycle troughs. The more a given activity varies in tandem with the business cycle, the greater the procylicality of the tax expenditure. While recent income tax and government spending policies have been explicitly devoted to stimulating the economy, the destabilizing impact of tax expenditures quietly negate much of the impact of fiscal stimulus measures. Our inability to discern tax expenditures' hidden destabilizing impact is symptomatic of a general neglect of macroeconomics in income tax policy. To avoid introducing and perpetuating further destabilizing forces into the current era of general economic uncertainty, macroeconomic perspectives should assume a more prominent place in tax policy discourse.

Originally published in 1975, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff is a very personal work from one of the most important macroeconomists of the last hundred years. And this new edition includes "Further Thoughts on Equality and Efficiency," a paper published by the author two years later. In classrooms Arthur M. Okun may be best remembered for Okun's Law, but his lasting legacy is the respect and admiration he earned from economists, practitioners, and policymakers. Equality and Efficiency is the perfect embodiment of that legacy, valued both by professional economists and those readers with a keen interest in social policy. To his fellow economists, Okun presents messages, in the form of additional comments and select citations, in his footnotes. To all readers, Okun presents an engaging dual theme: the market needs a place, and the market needs to be kept in its place. As Okun puts it: Institutions in a capitalist democracy prod us to get ahead of our neighbors economically after telling us to stay in line socially. This double standard professes and pursues an egalitarian political and social system while simultaneously generating gaping disparities in economic well-being. Today, Okun's dual theme feels incredibly prescient as we grapple with the hot-button topic of income inequality. In his foreword, Lawrence H. Summers declares: On what one might think of as questions of "economic philosophy," I doubt that Okun has been improved on in the subsequent interval. His discussion of how societies rely on rights as well as markets should be required reading for all young economists who are enamored with market solutions to all problems. With a new foreword by Lawrence H. Summers

Private equity has become an important source of finance in recent years for firms wanting to undertake a major restructuring or capital investment. Previously, its increased use was mainly associated with the 'back to basics' policy of many large companies and the consequent sale of non-core subsidiaries. Private equity investment houses have, however, diversified into financing other types of transaction. In doing so, they have achieved some attractive rates of return on amounts invested, which has led to an increase in the funds at their disposal. This article describes the current state of the UK private equity market. It also considers the extent to which private equity promotes efficiency by facilitating the 'shake-up' of businesses, and whether the success of investment houses in attracting substantially increased funds for investment poses any threats to financial stability. Private equity comprises equity investment in all types of unquoted companies, whether provided by individuals, funds or institutions. The article concentrates on larger transactions (particularly management buy-outs and buy-ins of over 10 million pound), and excludes start-up and early-stage venture capital finance, which in effect forms a distinct market with different characteristics.

Many studies predict massive job losses and real wage decline as a result of the ongoing widespread automation of production, a trend that may be further aggravated by the COVID-19 crisis. Yet automation is also expected to raise productivity and output. How can we share the gains from automation more widely, for the benefit of all? And what are the attendant equity-efficiency trade-offs? We analyze this issue by considering the effects of fiscal policies that seek to redistribute the gains from automation and address income inequality. We use a dynamic general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition, including a novel specification linking corporate power to automation. While fiscal policy cannot eliminate the classic equity-efficiency trade-offs, it can help improve them, reducing inequality at small or no loss of output. This is particularly so when policy takes advantage of novel, less distortive transmission channels of fiscal policy created by the empirically observed link between corporate market power and automation.

Environmental Markets explains the prospects of using markets to improve environmental quality and resource conservation. No other book focuses on a property rights approach using environmental markets to solve environmental problems. This book compares standard approaches to these problems using governmental management, regulation, taxation, and subsidization with a market-based property rights approach. This approach is applied to land, water, wildlife, fisheries, and air and is compared to governmental solutions. The book concludes by discussing tougher environmental problems such as ocean fisheries and the global atmosphere, emphasizing that neither governmental nor market solutions are a panacea.

Many fear that efforts to address inequality will undermine the economy as a whole. But the opposite is true: rising inequality has become a drag on growth and an impediment to market competition. Heather Boushey breaks down the problem and argues that we can preserve our nation's economic traditions while promoting shared economic growth.