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The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted an economic hardship unprecedented for the modern age. In this paper, we show that the health crisis and ensuing Great Lockdown, came with an unseen level of economic uncertainty. First, using a European dataset on country-level and regional internet searches, we document a substantial increase in people's economic anxiety in the months following the coronavirus outbreak. Moreover, we observe a significant, coinciding slowdown in labour markets and (durable) consumption. Second, our analysis shows that the ensuing fear was signific antly more outspoken in those EU countries hit hardest in economic terms. Finally, we show that economic anxiety during the Great Lockdown is similar or higher than during the Great Recession of 2007- 2009. Unprecedented policy actions, such as the short-term working schemes implemented or reformed at the onset of the COVID crisis, however, do not seem to have mitigated overall ec onomic anxiety.

Tax expenditures are preferential tax treatments granted to specific individuals or categories of households which aim at achieving social and economic goals. They are widely used by EU Member States. However, their fiscal and equity impacts are not always clear and their effectiveness and efficiency as a policy instrument need to be carefully evaluated, especially in the present context of constrained public finances. This paper quantifies the fiscal and equity effects of social tax expenditures related to housing, education and health in 27 European countries making use of EUROMOD, the EU-wide microsimulation model. We find a variety of effects, in terms of sign and magnitude, across Member States, and within these, among types of households. Overall our findings suggest that the impact of tax expenditure on tax revenues and on income inequalities can be sizeable. The redistributive impact of removing tax expenditures can go both directions, either on the progressive or regressive side, depending on the country and the tax expenditure considered.

Tax incentives favouring homeownership are widely used in developed economies. Homeownership is often thought to bring a number of positive contributions, from the promotion of households' saving to enhanced community engagement. However, housing tax incentives are also considered as a major source of distortions for households' decisions, especially in absence of taxation of in-kind services related to housing consumption (i.e. imputed rents) and in presence of mortgage interest payment deductibility. These distortions can have wide-ranging consequences for investment, consumption and public finances. Housing tax distortions have rarely been analysed from a cross-country perspective over time, however, not least because of the absence of comparable data and the difficulty to gather detailed information on the specific tax treatment of homeownership. In this paper we aim to fill this gap by providing comparable time series on the main features of housing taxation in European countries. Our database includes information on transfer taxes incurred when buying a house, implicit recurrent property taxes owed by households, capital gain taxes, imputed rent taxation and mortgage interest tax reliefs. The data is provided for the period 1995-2017 by the time of writing this paper and will be updated annually and made available at the following website: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/thematic-research-fiscal-policy/housing-taxation. We use this data to estimate the user cost of owner-occupied housing (UCOH) following the approach proposed by Poterba, (1992) and Poterba and Sinai (2008), which provides a synthetic indicator on the distortions exerted by the tax system on households' housing investment choices. A number of additional data used to calculate the UCOH indicator, such as maximum loan to value ratio and maximum loan duration, interest rate for long-term government bonds, interest income tax and house price are also provided.

Examining the cases of Canada, Germany, and Spain, the role played by fiscal equalization schemes in determining subnational borrowing was analyzed, and the link between regional governments' primary fiscal balances and gross domestic product per capita was tested econometrically. The study results show that either poor or rich regions can display higher regional public borrowing on average, and these results can be linked to the institutional design of regional equalization systems in place. Particular elements, such as tax efforts and fiscal capacities, also play relevant roles in this regard. Reforms of these schemes can therefore prove instrumental in reducing regional heterogeneity in public borrowing.

Simplified Human Hand Models for Manipulation Tasks

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported inputs, (ii) multinationals have the same input sourcing behaviour as domestic firms, irrespective of their country of origin, and (iii) the demand for locally produced inputs by multinationals is proportional to their share of locally produced output. We discuss why these assumptions are likely to be violated in practice, and provide alternative measures that overcome these drawbacks. Our results, using plant level data for Ireland, show clearly that the choice of backward linkage measure and thus, the assumptions behind them, matters greatly in order to draw possible conclusions regarding the existence of FDI-related spillovers. Using the standard measure employed in the literature we fail to find robust evidence for spillovers through backward linkages. However, when we use alternative measures of backward linkages that relax assumptions (i)-(iii), we find robust evidence for positive FDI backward spillover effects.

We examine the role of trends in rainfall in the poor growth performance of sub-Saharan African nations relative to other developing countries. To do so we use a new crosscountry panel climatic data set in an empirical economic growth framework. Our results show that rainfall has been a significant determinant of poor economic growth for Africa, but not for other developing countries. Depending on the benchmark measure of potential rainfall, we estimate that the direct impact under the scenario of no decline in rainfall would have resulted in a reduction of between around 15 and 40 per cent of today's gap in African GDP per capita relative to the rest of the developing world.

We study the regional location of multidimensionals in Ireland since the 1970s by focusing on the role played by agglomeration economies and public incentives intent on dispersing industrial activity to the more disadvantaged areas of Ireland. We find that regional policy has only been effective in attracting low-tech firms to the disadvantaged areas during the time when there was a much more laissez-faire approach to regional policy and when the primary industrial policy emphasis was on attracting hi-tech firms into Ireland in general. Our results also show that hi-tech firms spread more evenly across the country and that urbanization economies were for these firms a more important locational determinant than public incentives.

According to the ‘convergence hypothesis’ multinational companies will tend to displace national firms and trade as total market size increases and as countries converge in relative size, factor endowments, and production costs. Using a recent model developed by Markusen and Venables (1998) as a theoretical framework, we explicitly develop empirical measures to proxy bilateral FDI between two countries and address their properties with regard to the convergence hypothesis. Using a panel of data of country pairs over the years 1985-96 we econometrically test for the relationship between convergence and bilateral FDI. Our results provide some empirical support for the convergence hypothesis.

We examine the importance of a firm’s own R&D activity and intra-sectoral spillovers on the decision to export and the export intensity using firm level panel data for Spain for the period 1990 to 1998. Our results are in line with preceding findings on the role played by firmspecific variables such as age, firm size, productivity and workers’ skills. In addition, we show that export and R&D spillovers, either from MNEs or domestic firms in the sector, have a different impact on Spanish and foreign firms, the latter generally benefiting from positive spillovers. Further evidence shows a larger marginal impact of R&D spillovers on export intensity of Spanish firms exporting to other OECD countries than those exporting to non- OECD nations.