This paper surveys the evolution of macroeconomic policy, in the New Zealand context, from the beginning of the end of the Great Inflation of the 1970s/1980s, through to the current recovery from the Great Recession brought on by the Global Financial Crisis. The 30 or so years since the late...

New Zealand’s fiscal policy framework has been in place for nearly 20 years. At its core is a set of principles around maintaining prudent levels of public debt and running fiscal surpluses on average over time. This framework, combined with an extended period of economic growth, contributed...

Existing methodologies for estimating a government’s structural budget balance are reviewed and applied to the case of New Zealand. Besides the conventional cyclical adjustment, an assessment is made of other possible non-structural elements to the budgetary position, including the terms of...

The analysis of 1991 budget implementation proves that there where no significant changes in budget revenue and expenditure structure. The two exceptions are the entrenchment of capital expenses caused by the economic depression and the decline in subsidies related to the price liberalization....

Economic models can be extremely useful in the process of economic policy making. At the same time it should be emphasised that economic models should never be seen as a panacea for solving all kinds of economic problems. This paper discusses to what extent economic models could act as a useful...

This paper presents strong empirical evidence that automatic stabilizers and countercyclical fiscal policy decrease output volatility. The conducted empirical analysis proves the economic intuition that the automatic fiscal stance is countercyclical, regardless of the size and the prosperity of...

This paper describes the model of the Bulgarian economy designed, formulated and constructed within the Bulgarian Agency for Economic Analysis and Forecasting. The model is an annual model, although some of the parameters are estimated on the basis of quarterly information. Its main feature is...

The Fiscal Responsibility Act 1994 states that, as a principle of responsible fiscal management, a New Zealand government should ensure total Crown debt is at a prudent level by ensuring total operating expenses do not exceed total operating revenues. In this paper a structural VAR model is...

This paper reviews and extends a new framework, developed by Razin, Sadka, and Swagel, for capturing the effect of population ageing on public support for government social expenditures. Razin et al construct up an overlapping generations, median voter model, and investigate the empirical...