A Solution to Fiscal Procyclicality : The Structural Budget Institutions Pioneered by Chile

Historically, many countries have suffered a pattern of procyclical fiscal policy: spending too much in booms and then forced to cut back in recessions. This problem has especially plagued Latin American commodity exporters. Since 2000, fiscal policy in Chile has been governed by a structural budget rule that has succeeded in implementing countercyclical fiscal policy. Official estimates of trend output and the 10-year price of copper - which are key to the decomposition of the budget into structural versus cyclical components - are made by expert panels and thus insulated from the political process. Chile's fiscal institutions hold useful lessons everywhere, but especially in other commodity exporting countries