We examine the impact of four factors on the fiscal policies of the euro-area countries over the last two decades: the state of public finances, the European fiscal rules, cyclical conditions and general elections. We rely on information actually available to policy-makers at the time of...

Whether discretionary fiscal policies in industrialized countries act counter- or pro-cyclically and whether their reaction is symmetric or asymmetric over the cycle are still largely unsettled questions. This uncertainty remains even when attention is restricted to euro-area countries, where...

This paper examines the information-related problems associated with the analysis of fiscal policies, an issue recently analyzed in connection with monetary policies but largely ignored in the literature on budgetary actions. The results indicate that reliance on the information actually...

The Stability and Growth Pact sets a medium-term target for fiscal policy of a budgetary position "close to balance of in surplus". This addition to the deficit rule defined by the Maastricht Treaty has been interpreted as an attempt to reconcile the objective of sound public finances with the...

The volume collects the essays presented at the 14th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 29 to 31 March 2012. The workshop focused on the interaction between fiscal policy and growth and was organised in four sessions. The first session dealt with the...

The volume collects the essays presented at the 13th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia on 31 March-2 April 2011. The workshop concentrated on the measures aimed at guaranteeing sustainable budget policies in the aftermath of the global crisis started in 2008,...

The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

We study the effects of fiscal policy on macroeconomic developments in Italy over the period 1982-2010 with a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model. We include public debt and impose the government budget constraint in the estimation. In contrast with previous research we also include...

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policy on private GDP, inflation and the long-term interest rate in Italy using a structural vector autoregression model. To this end, a database of quarterly cash data for selected fiscal variables for the period 1982:1-2004:4 is constructed, largely...

In this paper we study the effects of fiscal policies on current consumption, distinguishing between Keynesian effects (KE), due to changes in current disposable income, and non-Keynesian effects (NE), due to expected changes in future disposable income. The literature has argued that permanent...