The budgeting process has been recently reformed in Italy (L. 196/2009) in order to improve control of budget and transparency in the provision of clear information on government fiscal policy. Indeed, the general government final expenditures often deviate significantly from the initial...

We analyse how fiscal decentralization affects the volatility of government consumption extending the existing literature that mainly deals with the effects of the former on government size. Using data for 97 developed and developing countries from 1971 to 2010, we find that a higher degree of...

A relevant mismatch between tax and expenditure decentralization characterizes many industrialized countries. The former is usually less pronounced than the latter, resulting in asymmetric fiscal decentralization arrangements. We investigate the nature of this asymmetry using a theoretical...

We study the relationship between discretionary fiscal policy and macroeconomic stability in 21 OECD countries over the 1985-2012 period. The novelties of our contribution lie in the use of annual panel data, whereas most of the existing evidence is cross-sectional, and more importantly in the...

International migration flows constitute one of the most policy-relevant elements of modern economies. The Italian experience is a case of particular interest given the rapid growth of immigration flows, the large number of countries of origin involved, and regional economic heterogeneity. This...

In this paper we stress the limits of the current debt sustainability framework used in the IMF-WB HIPC Initiative and the necessity to include domestic public debt into the analysis. The standard sustainability analysis does not take into account the fully-fledged budget constraint and the...

The history of debt relief is now particularly long, the associated costs are soaring and the outcomes are at least uncertain. This paper reviews and provides new evidence on the effects of recent debt relief programs on different macroeconomic indicators in developing countries, focusing on the...

The paper analyzes the relationships between mutual loan-guarantee societies (MLGS), small firms and banks trying to evaluate the role played by the guarantees granted by MLGSs and by different banks on the availability and the cost of credit. We focus on a sample of firms member of a specific...