Assainissement des finances publiques suisses. Taille et causes du problème, avec discussion de quelques mesures correctives

A new method is proposed to measure the underlying ("structural") surplus/deficit of a government budget. It does not rest on the notion of "full-employment GDP" but aims at modelling the fiscal behavior of the government in the widest sense. The basic idea is to identify what is systematic in that behavior from what is noise. The model is simple, yet econometrically quite robust. It is estimated with Swiss data and the results seem to make good sense. The paper includes a number of comments relating to current Swiss fiscal issues.