Building an optimal tax system is a strategic objective for any state. Under the conditions of the economy openness, both internal and external factors can have a significant impact on the pace of economic development of a country that affects the level of tax collection. The article both emphasizes the importance of tax system improvement and explains the necessity of tax administration optimization. A tax system approximated to optimal one will be less affected by the negative trends and modern tax administration will reduce costs, increase transparency and the taxpayers’ trust level. The tax system analysis was carried out based on studying the Visegrad Group countries’ experience (the Czech Republic and Poland), as well as Georgia and Belarus. As a result, it was observed a single direction of all countries’ development in the area of the tax system improvement, while the presence of the individual characteristics.

The trade wars following the 2014 events in Ukraine affected not only the directly involved participants, but also countries like Belarus that were affected through international trade linkages. According to estimations based on a model outlined in Ossa (2014), these trade wars led to an increase in the trade flow through Belarus and thereby an increase of its tariff revenue. At the same time, because of a ban on imports in the sectors of meat and dairy products, the tariff revenue of Russia declined.

The issue of gender equality in Belarus labor market is still unclear. On the one hand the rate of female participation is high. At the same time there is evidence of the rising gender pay gap that grew from 16.5% in 2005 to 24% in 2014. The decomposition of the wage gap during 2005- 2014 time period using Oaxaca-Blinder, Juhn-Murphy-Pierce and Machado-Mata techniques revealed that differences in income function (the difference in a way efforts of men and women are remunerated) are the main factors affecting the growth of gender inequality, while the personal characteristics are losing the influencing power. The role of the factors differs depending on the quantile of income distribution. I also find no association between wages and marriage for females, while there is a 10.5% wage premium in case of married males. The parenthood wage penalty is attributed to women and equals approximately 14.4%. Moreover, children from 0 to 6 provide the most severe drop in wages. In addition, the paper reveals that educated women are suffering the most and face 20.4% decline in wages, while penalty for women with the secondary school or lower amounts to just 8%.

Inflation expectations play a crucial role for macroeconomic dynamics and more specifically for monetary environment. However, inflation expectations is an unobservable variable. So, the quality of the correspondent measure in a great extent predetermines its feasibility for macroeconomic analysis. Today, survey-based measures of inflation expectations prevail in macroeconomic analysis. However, the drawbacks and/or unavailability of such measures give a rise to other identification strategies. Extracting inflation expectations from the actual data (e.g. series of interest rate and actual inflation) basing on SVAR identification approach has become a valuable alternative/supplement for measuring inflation expectations. In this paper I show that the existing strategy of inflation expectations identification through SVAR approach is very sensitive to the state of monetary environment. When a monetary environment is unstable (e.g. high and volatile inflation), the assumptions of the baseline approach are not hold, and it produces biased estimations. I emphasize two sources of this bias in estimations and suggest procedure for obtaining unbiased estimates. My identification strategy includes a number of steps. I suggest applying Markov regime-switching framework for extracting an unbiased mean for ex ante real interest rate. Further, I use two-stage SVAR identification strategy. First, I identify an unexpected shock to actual inflation, which is crucial for obtaining a proper measure of inflation expectations. Further, I net the series of ex post interest rate from this ‘noise’. Second, I run a baseline SVAR procedure, for which I use the data adjusted at the first step. Finally I obtain an unbiased and informatively rich series of inflation expectations.

This work suggests steps for reforming of Belarusian SOEs in order to find new sources of growth. Major mechanisms of efficiency increase are introduction and improvement of corporate governance, privatization/ attraction of investors, and bankrupcy and liquidation.