Documents Varga, Janos 4 results

"Productivity-enhancing structural reforms are crucial to the economic prospects of the EU. Indeed, such reforms are even more urgent in the current environment in which many economies are reaching the limits of the policy support they can provide to shore up demand. Moreover, even as some of the crisis-related effects fade, demographic headwinds loom, further strengthening the case for boosting productivity. The key question is how to identify, prioritise and calibrate the reforms that best suit each country's situation. This Forum examines specific barriers to enhanced productivity within the EU and puts forth policy proposals to offset the secular slowdown apparent in advanced economies and take better advantage of the EU's vast economic potential."

"In 2018 the structure of labour taxation in Romania changed substantially: the social security contributions' (SSC) burden shifted almost entirely to employees, the flat personal income tax (PIT) rate was cut and the PIT-free allowance increased. These changes followed the Unified Wage Law (UWL) adopted in 2017, which significantly increased the wages in the public sector. The government also increased the gross minimum wage and encouraged the social partners to re-negotiate salaries in the private sector, so that net wages would not decrease following the shift of social contributions to the employee side. This economic brief analyses the redistributive and macroeconomic impact of all of these reforms using EUROMOD, the microsimulation model for the European Union Member States, with QUEST, the European Commission's dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. According to our simulation results, the cumulative impact of the reforms slightly increases both market and disposable income inequality. Low-income employees gain marginally from the higher minimum wage, while the self-employed would be better off only by opting not to pay the social contributions, i.e. renouncing national insurance protection. In the longer run, the reforms are likely to have a negative effect on GDP and employment due to the wage pressure from higher public sector salaries and increased minimum wages. The general government deficit increases, although by significantly less than the raise that would have happened if the UWL had not been accompanied by the SSC shift."

"This paper studies the effects of labour market reforms on the functional distribution of income in a DSGE model (Roeger et al., 2008) with skill differentiation, in which households supply three types of labour: low-, medium- and high-skilled. The households receive income from labour, tangible capital, intangible capital, financial wealth and transfers. We trace how structural reforms in the labour market affect these different types of income. The quantification of labour market reforms is based on changes in structural indicators that significantly reduce the gap of the EU average income towards the best-performing EU countries. We find a general trade-off between an increase in employment for a particular group and the income of the average group member relative to income per capita. Reforms that increase employment of low- and medium-skilled workers imply a trade-off between employment and wages in the low- and medium-skilled group, due to the increase in the skill-specific supply of labour. Capital owners generally benefit from labour market reforms, with an increasing share in total income. This can be attributed to limited entry into the final goods production sector, underlining the importance of product market reforms in addition to labour market reforms."