Ukraine-Krieg und COVID-19-Pandemie trüben die Konjunkturaussichten ein. Für das Jahr 2022 wird ein Wirtschaftswachstum von 4½% erwartet, das in den Folgejahren auf durchschnittlich 1½% pro Jahr zurückgeht.

With around 90 percent of the average retirement income received from public pension entitlements, the Austrian pension system is very reliant on the first pillar. Occupational pensions are primarily offered through pension funds and insurance companies. Direct commitments are an alternative vehicle, but their usage stagnates. The option for defined contribution (DC) plans with favourable tax treatment offered either by pension funds or insurance companies boosted the prevalence of occupational pensions in Austria. While occupational pensions have become more popular over time, low interest rates and a high liquidity preference dampened demand for individual life insurance contracts. Over the years 2002 through 2021, the performance of pension funds in real net terms has been positive, with an annualised average return of 1.5 percent before tax. The life insurance industry followed a distinctly more conservative investment policy and achieved an average annual net real return before tax of 1.9 percent.

While taxes on wealth for a long time played only a marginal role in the public finance and taxation literature, the increase of wealth inequality and concentration in many EU countries has spurred new interest in wealth taxation. At the same time, recurrent net wealth taxes have almost completely disappeared in Europe, inter alia due to fears of asset and taxpayer migration. The paper provides estimates of the revenue that could be raised from an EU-wide net wealth tax enabling the containment of migration responses, using data from the Household, Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). To account for differential non-response, we augment the HFCS with data from the Forbes rich list as well as national rich lists and replace the top tail of the wealth distribution according to the HFCS by an estimated Pareto distributed top tail. To account for underreporting we scale aggregate financial assets in the HFCS to match their counterparts outlined in the National Accounts. We estimate that a moderately progressive net wealth tax levied at a rate of 1 percent on net wealth between 1 and 5 million €, and 1.5 percent on wealth above 5 million €, could raise between 165 and 177 billion € after accounting for avoidance and evasion responses. Such an EU harmonised net wealth tax would affect only a small fraction of households, ranging between 0.41 percent in Latvia and 8.65 percent in Belgium.

We assess the effectiveness of the financial sector stabilisation measures taken by the Austrian authorities in the wake of the global financial crisis. Employing an event study methodology, we evaluate domestic and cross-border effects involving Central, Eastern and South-eastern European economies. We identify recapitalisations and public guarantees as the most effective sovereign interventions. Both mitigate financial market stress at home and abroad. However, a risk-shifting effect emerges at the sovereign's expense which undermines their effectiveness relative to monetary policy interventions. Moreover, in complement to the actual implementation, the mere announcement of interventions already mitigates financial market stress, underscoring the extent of policy credibility.

Die kalte Progression entsteht aus dem Zusammenspiel einer nominellen Einkommenssteigerung, der Inflation und eines progressiven Steuertarifs. Systemimmanent und ohne Anpassung des Einkommensteuergesetzes steigt so die Steuerquote. Dem Regierungsvorhaben "Teuerungs-Entlastungspaket Teil II" zufolge sollen die Tarifgrenzen und Absetzbeträge jährlich im Ausmaß der gesamten Inflation angepasst werden, um eine inflationsneutrale Einkommensbesteuerung zu gewährleisten. Das Entlastungsvolumen wird so durch einen "Tarif auf Rädern" (TaR) bestimmt. Diese mikroökonomisch motivierte Vorgangsweise impliziert makroökonomisch eine systematische Überkompensation in dem Sinn, dass die Steuersenkungen immer höher sind als die steuerlichen Mehreinnahmen, die durch die kalte Progression erzielt wurden. Das Ausmaß der Differenz kann beträchtlich sein: Für die Lohn- und Einkommensteuer der Periode 2023 bis 2026 weist der Ministerialentwurf Kosten des "Tarifs auf Rädern" von kumuliert 20,3 Mrd. € aus, während die Mehreinnahmen aus der kalten Progression auf 6,1 Mrd. € geschätzt werden. In diesem Beitrag wird ein Mechanismus zum Ausgleich der kalten Progression vorgeschlagen, der "nur" die Mehreinnahmen aus der kalten Progression vollständig kompensiert. Dieser wird den Mehrkosten des "Tarifs auf Rädern" gegenübergestellt. Ein Anstieg der Lohnsteuerquote, der aus der Wirkung der realen Progression durch einen Anstieg der Reallöhne pro Kopf resultiert, könnte "klassisch" auch im Zuge einer Steuerreform ausgeglichen werden.

In view of the challenges posed by climate change and the increasingly ambitious climate targets around the world, the search for effective climate policy instruments is gaining momentum. Carbon pricing, for example, in the form of a carbon tax, and its effects are therefore attracting increasing attention in academic as well as policy discussions. We review the empirical effects of carbon taxes with regard to several impact dimensions commonly studied in the literature: environmental effectiveness, macroeconomic effects, impacts on competitiveness and innovation, distributional implications, and public acceptance. An increasing body of empirical studies shows that carbon taxes can effectively reduce carbon emissions or at least dampen their growth while not negatively affecting economic growth, employment, and competitiveness. The existing empirical evidence suggests that the distributional impact of carbon taxes depends on the type of energy use and the indicators to capture distributional effects, as well as on household characteristics. Lump-sum transfers are shown to be better suited to mitigate regressive effects for lower incomes, while higher incomes benefit more from a reduction of labour taxes. Public acceptance of carbon taxes can be increased by providing public information, avoiding negative distributional effects, and channelling part of the revenues into "environmental projects".

The paper studies endogenous employment and distribution dynamics in a Post-Keynesian growth model of the Kalecki–Steindl tradition. Productivity adjustments stabilise employment and the labour share in the long run: technological change allows firms to replenish the reserve army of workers in a struggle over income shares and thereby keeps wage demands in check. Labour market dynamics follow from separate wage and price curves. The authors discuss stability conditions and the equilibrium dynamics and investigate how legal working time and its reduction affect this equilibrium.