This paper contributes to the debate on the French public finances'consolidation by investigating the long-term sustainability of France’s fiscal position. We trace the historical trends of government’s tax receipts and expenditures. We find that while the level of public expenditure in...

This paper contributes to the debate on fiscal governance for the European Monetary Union, assessing the different fiscal rules currently discussed. We simulate a small scale macroeconomic model with forward looking agents, augmented with a public finances block. We account for both the positive...

The purpose of this note is to compare the characteristics of the actual Stability and Growth Pact with that of a European "modified golden rule". The latter would consist in achieving in each EU country a cyclically-adjusted net-of-public-investment balance. The benchmark for comparison is the...

This paper aims at providing a quantitative assessment of different proposals for reforming the Stability and Growth Pact by extending a counterfactual experiment performed in Eichengreen and Wyplosz (1998). Using estimated coefficients from a reduced form model, we simulate the path of the...