This study tests the hypothesis that balanced-budget rules (BBRs) that restrict public borrowing to investments in public infrastructure increase growth by increasing the productivity of debt, either because investments in public infrastructure are more productive than other uses for which...

The paper provides an alternative explanation for the “resource curse” based on the income effect resulting from high government current spending in resource rich economies. Using a simple life cycle framework, we show that private investment in the non-resource sector is adversely affected...

Maintaining today’s global imbalances would help to overcome the major disproportion of our times – income gap between developed and developing countries. This gap was widening for 500 years and only now, in the recent 50 years, there are some signs that this gap is starting to decrease. The...

Poverty and inequality around the world has been rising over the last three decades and the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) seems a far fetched goal. In explaining underdevelopment, Classical Economics has offered many theories and models including but not limited to...

The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has raised interest in early warning indicators, aimed at signalling the build-up of fiscal stress in advance and helping prevent crises by means of a timely counteraction of fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This paper presents possible improvements...

In this paper we reflect on the role that fiscal policy could play in the resolution of the crisis in Eurozone countries crippled by both public and private debt, and beset by growth and competitiveness problems. As an illustration, we revisit the Spanish case, a paradigmatic example of the...

Should rational agents take into consideration government policy announcements? A skilled agent (an econometrician) could set up a model to combine the following two pieces of information in order to anticipate the future course of fiscal policy in real-time: (i) the ex-ante path of policy as...

This article analyses the redistributive efficiency of public spending and taxation in a panel of both advanced and developing economies during the last three decades (1984-2012). In order to explore how redistribution is achieved through fiscal policies, a two-stage approach is applied. First,...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it presents a very concise way of measuring fiscal stance. This procedure is based on the assumption that the ‘neutral change’ in the government budget can best be simulated with a long-term approximation of the underlying trend of total output....

In October 2008 the main Hungarian public finance actors: the government, the National Bank of Hungary (MNB) and experts cited the high public debt and volume of unsecured foreign-currency loans as the main reasons for the economy’s vulnerability. On the other hand according to the formal...