This paper discusses the development of public expenditure in the Netherlands since 1850. Why did public expenditure increase from 14% GDP in 1850, nearly 20% in 1921, 30% GDP in 1950 and over 60% GDP in 1983? Dutch public expenditure has fallen to less than 50% GDP in 2003. Why did this...

This article describes the argumentative structure of Hayek on the relationship between tax policy and redistribution. It is observed throughout its work giving special attention to two of his works: The Constitution of Liberty (1959) and Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3, The Political Order...

Overall, this paper presents a white swan that seems to confirm the hypothesis of Alesina / Tabellini / Campante (2008). Fiscal policy in many developing countries is procyclical. Specifically, the former may explain monetary policy failures associated with problems of political agency. And in...

This book aims to study the consequences of the subprime crisis for New Caledonia, a French overseas Pacific territory. The situation of New-Caledonia is specific in many ways, since this territory is undergoing an institutional process of emancipation from France. On the first hand, New...

Fiscal policy was key determinant of macroeconomic behavior during the 80s, however it is necessary to distinguish the effects of shocks over fiscal policy from those resulting of policy decisions. For that purpose the study uses, with an adjustment, the methodology developed by Marshall and...

Fiscal policy is an important government tool for managing the economy, having the ability to affect the total amount of output produced - GDP. Changes in the level and composition of government spending, taxation or other instruments of fiscal policy have impact on aggregate demand, the pattern...

This paper offers a comprehensive review of macroeconomic policy in democratic South Africa. It does so with two distinctive features. First, macroeconomic policy is analysed on four interlocking, and sometimes conflicting, levels: [1] policy as provided “on paper” in government plans and...

Une double crise bancaire et souveraine dans plusieurs pays de la zone euro appelle à chercher des solutions innovantes et à revisiter des solutions ayant déjà fait preuve. L’expérience suédoise de la résolution d’une crise immobilière et bancaire dans les années 1990, qui a...

The goal of the paper is to analyze the importance of government debt in the propagation of fiscal shocks in the Argentine economy. For that reason we augment a standard fiscal policy vector Autoregression with the nominal debt to GDP ratio taken from a recently compiled IMF database. The main...

This paper analyzes German and Spanish fiscal policy using simple policy rules. We choose Germany and Spain, as both are Member States in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and underwent considerable increases in public debt in the early 1990s. We focus on the question, how fiscal policy behaves...