Achieving France's medium-term fiscal targets will require significant expenditure efforts. This paper identifies areas where there is scope for increasing expenditure efficiency, with a view to achieving higher quality and more sustainable fiscal consolidation. The methodology is based on a...

We consider public debt from a long-term historical perspective, showing how the purposes for which governments borrow have evolved over time. Periods when debt-to-GDP ratios rose explosively as a result of wars, depressions and financial crises also have a long history. Many of these episodes...

A New Keynesian model with government production, public compensation, and unemployment is fit to U.S. data to study the macroeconomic and fiscal effects of public wage reductions. We find that accounting for the type of government spending is crucial for its macroeconomic implications. Although...

This paper investigates the effects of fiscal consolidation announcements on sovereign spreads in a panel of 21 emerging market economies during 2000-18. We construct a novel dataset using a global news database to identify the precise announcement date of fiscal consolidation actions. Our...

Bolivia's 'Patriotic Agenda 2025' sets targets for social and economic development propelled by state-led industrialization under a five-year development plan (2016-2020). Large-scale public investment has aimed to fill infrastructure gaps and raise productivity to ensure sustained medium-term...

A fiscal reaction function to debt and the cycle is built on a buffer-stock model for the government. This model inspired by the buffer-stock model of the consumer (Deaton 1991; Carroll 1997) includes a debt limit instead of the Intertemporal Budget Constraint (IBC). The IBC is weak (Bohn, 2007), a...