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To promote transparency and provide information, the Federal Planning Bureau regularly publishes the methods and results of its works. The publications are organised in different series, such as Outlooks, Working Papers and Planning Papers. Some reports can be consulted here, along with the Short Term Update newsletters that were published until 2015. You can search our publications by theme, publication type, author and year.
Working Papers - Working Paper 04-09 (fr),
The fear of massive job losses has prompted a fast-growing literature on offshoring and its impact on employment in advanced economies. This paper examines the situation for Belgium. The offshoring intensity is computed as a volume measure of the share of imported intermediate inputs in output based on a series of constant price supply-and-use tables for the period 1995-2003. Both materials and business services offshoring to high-wage and low-wage countries are addressed. The split-up according to the origin of the imported intermediates is done combining detailed trade data with data from the use table. The main findings are that materials offshoring stands at a higher level than business services offshoring, but that the latter grows much faster especially for the Central and Eastern European countries. Estimations of static and dynamic industry-level labour demand equations augmented by offshoring intensities do not reveal a significant impact of either materials or business services offshoring on total employment for Belgium between 1995 and 2003. However, this does not preclude a differential impact by skill-level.
Working Papers - Working Paper 01-09 (en),
Increased international economic integration and skill-biased technological change are often regarded as the main drivers of the rising inequality in wages and employment witnessed in industrialized countries in recent decades as they are believed to emphasize differences between individuals in level of education. However, proponents of a task-based view of technological change and offshoring stress the evolving content of tasks as the major determinant of shifts in labour demand and argue that this does not necessarily imply a clear-cut match between the level of education and job opportunities. Belgian data from the Structure and Distribution of Earnings Survey for the period 1999-2004 suggest that the level of wages is significantly correlated with the level of education but wage growth is not. Occupation seems to explain a statistically significant part of the wage level as well as wage growth of workers. The analysis supports the view that the level of education provides less information than the occupation of workers in explaining changes in wages and employment. Overall, it appears that a policy that simply aims to increase the level of education of the active population is not warranted. In addition to the risk of over-education, such a policy is not likely to alleviate the mismatch which to some extent exists between the competencies required by employers and the competencies offered by workers and the unemployed.
Working Papers - Working Paper 22-08 (en),
The objective of the report is to provide an overview of the main drivers of economic growth and the productivity evolution in Belgium, in comparison with the EU and the US, between 1970 and 2005, based on a consistent data set. The growth accounting methodology is applied to explain value added and labour productivity growth for the total economy, manufacturing and market services. This decomposition exercise diverges from what has been applied in Belgium up to now, as it uses capital services flows rather than the capital stock and labour services flows rather than the number of hours worked to measure the contribution of these factors of production to economic and productivity growth. Contributions of the main industries to value added, employment and productivity growth are also estimated.
Working Papers - Working Paper 17-08 (en),
The paper describes how an input-output table can be linked to detailed employment data in order to provide qualitative employment multipliers. Qualitative employment multipliers specify the direct and indirect labour use by final demand products of worker types differentiated by gender, age class, professional status, educational attainment level, labour regime or a combination of these characteristics.
Working Papers - Working Paper 15-07 (en),
Working Papers - Working Paper 13-07 (nl),
The distinction between the young and the elderly within low and high wage earning employment in HERMES, the FPB's medium-term macroeconomic model, enables the assessment of both age and wage related labour cost reducing policies. The age structure of salaried employment in each branch of activity is embedded in a three-stage mechanism. First, aggregate demand and the relative cost of labour to capital determine salaried employment. Next, relative wages allocate employment among three major labour categories: low-paid jobs, high-paid jobs and special-employment programmes. Finally, within each labour category relative wages allocate employment between the young (aged less than fifty) and the elderly (aged fifty or more).
Working Papers - Working Paper 12-07 (en),
Every three years, each EU member state is required to set out its political priorities related to economic growth and job creation in a so-called National Reform Programme ( NRP ). Gauged by the latest medium-term economic outlook produced by the Federal Planning Bureau, compliance with the main macroeconomic objectives contained in the Belgian NRP will still require sizable efforts, especially regarding the labour market. Furthermore, our analysis shows that reducing social security contributions in order to lower the tax wedge on labour as foreseen in the NRP , is efficient in increasing the employment rate, especially when targeted at low wage earners, but also that such policies have a negative effect on the objectives related to public finances and CO 2 emissions.
Working Papers - Working Paper 11-07 (fr),
This paper provides a rough estimate for Belgium of the proportion of service jobs at risk of being offshored in the wake of ICT-developments, and compares the results for Belgium with results for the EU15 and the US. Occupational employment data from the Labour Force Survey are used to produce this estimate by identifying service jobs that could possibly be offshored due to ICT-enabled tradability. The results show that the share of such jobs is lower for Belgium than for the EU15 or the US, but that there is an upward trend in this share over the period 1993 to 2005. Industry-level data and a shift-and-share analysis are used to explain the results.
Working Papers - Working paper 06-07 (en),
The objective of this report is to provide an overview of the main drivers of economic growth and productivity evolution in Belgium between 1970 and 2004, based on a consistent data set. The growth accounting methodology is applied to explain value added and labour productivity growth for total economy, manufacturing and market services. This decomposition exercise diverges from what has been applied in Belgium up to now, as it uses capital services flows rather than capital stock to measure the contribution of capital factor to production growth. Contributions of the main industries to value added, employment and productivitygrowth are also estimated.
Working Papers - Working Paper 05-07 (en),
Working Papers - Working Paper 02-07 (nl),
Working Papers - Working Paper 12-06 (nl),
Working Papers - Working Paper 21-04 (fr), (nl),
The impact of the current personal income tax reform on wages, value added and production is assessed. When fully implemented and all feedback on the goods and factor markets is accounted for, the 2001 fiscal reform and the removal of the crisis surcharge tax will cut the personal income tax rate by 3.1 percentage points and the market-sector real wage by 1.7%-2.6%.
Working Papers - Working Paper 11-04 (en),
Working Papers - Working Paper 16-03 (fr),
This paper assesses to which extent the policy of reducing employers’ social security contributions has increased market sector employment in 1995-2000. The analytical framework is a macroeconometric labour market model of the market sector that models added value, the employment of labour and capital, the setting of wages and prices, the matching of supply and demand on the labour market, and the dynamics that tie short-run behaviour to the steady state. The real wage cost depends on the wage gap, labour productivity, the replacement rate of unemployment benefits to the take home wage, and tensions on the labour market. The model comes in two versions. The ‘right-to-manage’ version links the wage cost to the unemployment rate; the ‘job-search’ version ties the wage cost to the unemployment-vacancy-ratio.
Working Papers - Working Paper 14-03 (nl),
Working Papers - Working Paper 13-03 (fr), (nl),
Working Papers - Working Paper 02-03 (nl),
Working Papers - Working Paper 15-02 (nl),
The medium-term outlook for Belgium points towards an average GDP growth rate of 2.2% during the 2006-2011 period, which is slightly higher than potential (2.0%). This pace of growth should follow a slowdown in economic growth in 2005 (1.5%) and a rebound in 2006 (2.4%). Economic growth in Belgium should remain slightly higher than in the euro area, on average.
Despite moderate wage increases, the average yearly growth rate for private consumption should reach 1.8% during the 2006-2011 period, in particular because of the increase in household disposable income (stimulated especially by reductions in personal income tax and increases in employment and social benefits). Investment growth should reach 2.5% during the 2006-2011 period, mainly reflecting the path of business investment growth, but also an acceleration in public investment at the end of the projection period. Growth in exports should be 5.4% on average and the contribution of net exports to GDP growth is expected to be 0.3%-points. The external surplus, which was strongly reduced between 2002 and 2005, should increase again after 2007 and attain 3.2% of GDP in 2011 (partly as a result of the improvement of the terms of trade). Limited increases in wage costs, the decline in oil prices after 2007 and a negative output gap until the end of the projection period, should allow the inflation rate to remain below 2% in the medium term.
The expected evolution of employment reflects a favourable macroeconomic context, a limited increase in wage costs and various policy measures. After the net creation of approximately 39,000 and 41,000 jobs in 2005 and 2006 respectively, about 35,000 jobs should be created every year during the 2007-2011 period. Between 2005 and 2011, industrial employment should fall by 30,000 persons, but the number of jobs created in market services should exceed 250,000. Nevertheless, in view of the strong increase in the labour force (mainly in the 50-64 age class) the fall in unemployment will be limited to 38,000 persons. The unemployment rate (broad administrative statistics) should fall from 14.3% in 2005 to 13.1% in 2011.
Under the assumption of constant policy, public accounts are expected to deteriorate markedly, with a net public financing requirement of 0.3% of GDP appearing in 2006, widening to 1.2% in 2007, before gradually falling to 0.3% by the end of the projection period. Nevertheless, the total public debt to GDP ratio is still expected to decline from 93.9% in 2005 to 78.0% in 2011.
Working Papers - Working Paper 06-02 (en),
Working Papers - Working Paper 04-02 (nl),
Working Papers - Working Paper 03-02 (fr), (nl),
Working Papers - Working Paper 07-01 (en),
Working Papers - Working Paper 02-01 (fr),
Working Papers - Working Paper 06-00 (fr),
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