The paper aims to critically examine the problems of public debt in Italy under the criteria of the Maastricht Treaty and subsequent decisions by Europe in tax matters. On this issue, the paper shows Italy's efforts in the direction of the Maastricht criteria, but also highlights the problems to...

There is a widespread view that reducing national debts and deficits, or “consolidating” them, causes austerity or would hinder the recovery. The reality is that reducing structural debts and deficits and “stimulus debts” is easily done without any significant deflationary effects. In...

We assess the issue of fiscal sustainability in the selected EU countries. Our sample includes those showing the highest government debts, which are nowadays known under the somewhat degrading acronym – PIIGGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Great Britain and Spain). Assuming the so-called...

The paper probed the impact of supply of money on food and general price indices by estimating a series of equations taking CPI food, CPI general, WPI food, WPI general, GDP deflator and SPI as measures of inflation and M1, M2 and M3 supply of money as explanatory variables. For analysis, OLS...

This paper compares the stochastic behavior of fiscal variables under optimal fiscal policy for the cases of full commitment by the government (Ramsey problem) and no commitment by the government (focusing on differentiable Markov perfect equilibrium). It shows that the cyclical properties of...

In this paper, we investigate the issues regarding the stabilization of public debt and its decrease down to 60 per cent of GDP for selected European Union countries using the primary balance derived from the public debt dynamic model as a leading indicator. We find that there is a high...

Unsustainable levels of debt for some European economies is causing enormous strain in the Euro area. How to tide over the debt crisis seems to be the most important objective the European policy makers are currently facing. We use a dynamic general equilibrium closed economy model to compute...

Using the simple arithmetic of government budget constraint, we perform an analysis on the Italian case, investigating the consequences on the main public finance aggregates of the adoption of a fiscal policy rule responding to past real debt/GDP ratio. Such a rule, firmly grounded in the...

The paper attempts to empirically explore the transmission mechanism regarding the short-term impact of public debt and growth. We examine and evaluate the direct effect of higher indebtedness on economic growth for countries in the EU which are in the epicentre of the current sovereign debt...