Are Expenditure Cuts the Only Effective Way to Achieve Successful Fiscal Adjustment

We re-examine the conventional view that to be successful, fiscal adjustments should rely on spending cuts and not on tax increases. We apply the Bai-Perron structural break filter instead of ad hoc rules to identify fiscal adjustments and their successfulness in 20 OECD countries. Our results suggest that the composition of fiscal adjustments is not related to their success. Furthermore, we find that political-economy variables considered are not robustly related to successful fiscal adjustments with one exception: the probability of a successful fiscal adjustment increases if left-wing governments rely on spending cuts and right-wing governments rely on tax increases