The so-called new economic consensus has begun to reassess the role and place of fiscal policy and is calling for its restitution in certain cases. Although a "consensus" may exist on various macroeconomic issues within this literature, fiscal policy is not one of them. The debate is stirred...

This paper deals with Harrod's fiscal policies to raise the warranted growth rate toward the natural growth rate. Harrod shows that an increase in the budget deficit/GDP ratio raises the short-run growth rate while lowering the warranted growth rate. In order to raise the warranted growth rate...

The aim of this paper is to focus on the institutional process by which the Brazilian government spends, borrows, and collects taxes. I am going to evaluate the conventional view that taxes finance government spending, that bond sales are financing operations, and that the Brazilian federal...

This paper proposes a Keynesian view of the current financial crisis, its economic consequences, and solutions to get out of it. We argue that the mainstream economists could not see the crisis coming because of the self-adjusting properties of their economic models. Keynes's theory, on the...

(from the 1988 French edition): Saving is the scourge of any economy that is not the mythological barter society of Ricardian economics. The author infers that saving is the major cause of unemployment in monetary economies.

This paper puts forward the notion that the recent evolution of the U.S. economy can be fully explained by demand-side variables. The authors empirically test some hypotheses about the role of fiscal and monetary policies and of income distribution in shaping effective demand. Using a rigorous...

Canada's record both before and during the financial crisis has been recognized by many in the media as one of great achievement that other countries should seek to learn from and emulate: a dozen years of public-sector budgetary surpluses followed by fiscal stimulus packages that spanned two...

The initial mildly Keynesian fiscal policy applied to the 2008 financial crisis in the UK is outlined and the shifts in policy indicated. The focus of this article is on the use of the concept of structural budget deficit and potential output in the formulation of fiscal policy. It is argued...

The article evaluates the fiscal policy initiatives during the Great Recession in the United States. It argues that, although the nonconventional fiscal policies targeted to the financial sector dwarfed conventional countercyclical stabilization efforts directed to the real sector, the...

Fiscal policies in the countries of Latin America have evolved within very different institutional landscapes resulting from a long history of financial crises. This article analyzes several of the economic and institutional transformations of the three largest economies of Latin America,...