In a number of oil producing countries, oil revenue accounts for the majority of government revenue, but is expected to be depleted in a relatively short time frame. Ensuring that fiscal policy is on a sustainable path is thus a high priority, but political and social adjustment costs create...

Despite the rise in public debt, Japanese Government Bond (JGB) yields have remained low and stable, supported by steady inflows from the household and corporate sectors, high domestic ownership of JGBs, and safe-haven flows from heightened sovereign risks in Europe. Over time, however, the...

While models based on Friedman's (1957) permanent-income hypothesis can provide oilproducing countries with long-run fiscal targets, they usually abstract from short-run costs associated with consolidation. This paper proposes a model that takes such adjustment costs (or "habits") into account....

Rising longevity, falling fertility rates, and the retirement of the baby boom generation will substantially raise age-related government spending in most advanced and many emerging market countries. This paper assesses the evolution of fiscal sustainability for each of the G-7 countries using...

Despite the rapid rise in public debt and large fiscal deficits, Japanese Government Bond (JGB) yields have remained fairly stable. Possible factors include: Japan's sizeable pool of household savings, presence of large and stable institutional investors, and strong home bias. These factors are...

The paper analyzes the determinants of success of recent fiscal consolidations in the OECD countries as well as the short-run and long-run effects of fiscal adjustments on economic activity by looking at fourteen case studies, panel data for OECD countries, and the results of simulations using a...

This paper considers long-term fiscal policy options in Norway, the world's fifth largest oil exporter, in light of the substantial expected increase in pension outlays. It compares the current fiscal rule, which targets a (central government structural) non-oil deficit equal to 4 percent of...

This paper examines the distributional effects of fiscal consolidation. Using episodes of fiscal consolidation for a sample of 17 OECD countries over the period 1978–2009, we find that fiscal consolidation has typically had significant distributional effects by raising inequality, decreasing...

In Japan, intergenerational inequality in lifetime resources is substantial, with a heavier fiscal burden on the young than the old. Moreover, given the need for fiscal consolidation, the inequality is even worse than existing policy would suggest. However, this does not mean that fiscal...

This paper presents a new dataset of fiscal consolidation for 17 OECD economies during 1978-2009. We focus on discretionary changes in taxes and government spending primarily motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by a response to prospective economic conditions. To identify...