This paper analyses the determinants of public expenditures allocated to investment. We perform welfare analysis in an overlapping generations model with public consumption, public investment, debt and taxes. The optimal public investment share depends positively on the productive contribution...

Several recent studies imply that the response of national saving to fiscal policy is non-monotonic. In this paper, we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-monotonic responses arise: one refers to a sample of OECD countries, as in previous studies, and one to a...

Under the Stability and Growth Pact, countries are committed to achieving medium-term budget positions of “close to balance or in surplus”. The rationale for this commitment is that such budgetary positions would allow for the full working of the built-in stabilizers without triggering the...

This paper analyses two features of concern to policy-makers in the countries of the prospective European Monetary Union: the solvency of their government’s finances; and the accuracy of fiscal forecasts. Extending the existing methodology of solvency tests, the paper finds that, with few...