O4 - Economic Growth and Aggregate ProductivityReturn

In the OECD, tax policy makes one of the highly sensitive areas of critical importance to the governance of global economy. The OECD authorities realize the importance of tax systems' structure for economic output and social well-being, and thus the tax policy has made one of the OECD policy priorities since the OECD's earliest days. However, the policy has been aimed on giving recommendations to national authorities solely in the area of optimal tax mix structure, while other important aspects of the tax systems have remained omitted. One of such aspects is legal certainty about the development of taxation. If the certainty is low, expectations of economic entities are deformed, which leads to substitution effect, and higher risk occurs. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to validate the hypothesis that higher legal certainty in the area of taxation significantly promotes economic growth. This hypothesis is confirmed within the analysis, and more attention to legal aspects of taxation is suggested.

The recent financial and economic crisis has put considerable strains not only on public but also on private finances. In the paper we analyse the development of nonfinancial corporate debt (measured as liabilities minus shares and other equities) in the time period 1995-2010 for 17 European OECD countries. In growth equations the dependent variable is the growth rate of real GDP per head and forward moving averages of this growth rate. Descriptive statistics reveal that in the examined period the nonfinancial corporations' debt has been rising steadily (first of all in Sweden, the Netherlands and Portugal). The basic estimation technique has been panel fixed effects corrected for heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation. The coefficients showing the impacts of corporate debt on GDP growth have had the sign minus and have been highly statistically significant. A 10 percentage point increase in nonfinancial corporations' debt has been associated with an approximately 5 basis point reduction in per head real GDP growth. We have used also cross-section specific and period specific coefficients to gain a more profound look into the matter.