We analyze how the combined effect of automatic stabilizers and discretionary changes in tax-benefit systems have affected the cushioning of income shocks in the Euro zone and the EU-27 in the period 2007-2014. We propose a new summary measure of the combined effect of automatic stabilizers and...

We analyse the international transmission of interest rates by focusing on the role of the accumulation of international reserves and on the financing of sovereign debt. An increase in foreign exchange reserves is expected to moderate the influence of U.S. interest rates. However, a high level...

We study the relationship between the budget balance and the current account balance for European Union(EU) countries, using quarterly data from1995 to2020. Through the use of panel Granger causality tests and a panel SUR model, we conclude that the relationship is bi-directional for the EU...

The lesson of the sovereign debt crises of the 2010s, and of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is that EMU irreversibility, if not to remain a wishful statement in the founding treaties, necessitates to be completed by carefully designed ramparts for extraordinary times beside regulations...

We study the relationship between the government budget balance and the current account balance for Portugal, using quarterly data from 1999 to 2019. On the one hand, the causality tests find a unidirectional relation running from the current account balance to the government budget balance. On...

We empirically assess whether a usually expected negative response of private consumption and private investment to a fiscal consolidation is reversed. We focus on a large sample of 174 countries between 1970 and 2018. We also employ three alternative measures of the Cyclically Adjusted Primary...

We revisit the relation between budget deficits and current account deficits for 28 European Union countries from 1996 to 2019. We find that an increase in budget deficit of 1 pp of GDP results in a deterioration of the current account deficit of 0.318 pp of GDP, which supports the Twin Deficits...

The budget dispute between Italy and the European Commission in 2018 gave new impetus for the debate about the reliability of output gap estimation methods and their use for calculating structural budget balances. In this paper we review the main properties of the mainstream approaches and...

We investigate the bilateral relationship between government budget balances and current account balances for Portugal and Germany. We find that the response of the current account balance to the budget balance is greater in Portugal than in Germany. On the other hand, the response of the budget...