New Zealand's fiscal outlook deteriorated following the Global Financial Crisis, and in late 2008 fiscal projections showed net government debt in New Zealand increasing from 5% of GDP to around 40% within 10 years, mostly reflecting permanently lower expectations for future tax revenue. These...

In recent years, fiscal performance in Central Europe has steadily deteriorated, in contrast to the improvement in the Baltics. This paper explores the determinants of such differences among countries on the path to EU accession. Regression estimates suggest that economic and institutional...

This paper explores the factors behind the time path of real spending and revenue in the West German states from 1975 to 2004. The empirical approach stresses robustness and takes into account a large set of economic and political variables. Our results suggest that common economic factors and,...

Economic growth is one of the objectives of the current government. Fiscal policy, encompassing government expenditure and taxation decisions, can significantly impact on economic growth. This paper proposes a framework which views fiscal policy through three lenses and applies this approach to...

New Zealand's fiscal policy framework has been in place for nearly 20 years. At its core is a set of principles around maintaining prudent levels of public debt and running fiscal surpluses on average over time. This framework, combined with an extended period of economic growth, contributed to...

Existing methodologies for estimating a government's structural budget balance are reviewed and applied to the case of New Zealand. Besides the conventional cyclical adjustment, an assessment is made of other possible non-structural elements to the budgetary position, including the terms of...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy in New Zealand using a structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model. The model is the five-variable structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework proposed by Blanchard and Perotti (2005), further augmented to allow for the...

Das erste Jahr der Corona-Pandemie stand in Deutschland im Zeichen extremer Schwankungen der ökonomischen Aktivität und einer massiven Lähmung der Binnenwirtschaft. Insgesamt dürfte das Bruttoinlandsprodukt in diesem Jahr um 3,7% und im kommenden Jahr um 3,9% zunehmen. Die öffentlichen...

In Japan ist das reale Bruttoinlandsprodukt im Jahr 2002 nur um 0,2% gestiegen. Die Arbeitslosenquote lag im Jahresdurchschnitt bei 5,4%, und die Preise sanken - im vierten Jahr in Folge - um 0,9%. In diesem Jahr dürfte das reale BIP um 2,7% expandieren. Auf dem Arbeitsmarkt wird sich keine...