We discuss and provide an overview of the size and role of the government, notably in terms of what the government “should” do, how the government could spend and intervene in the economy, how much governments spend and what they spend their money on. This is done from a historical...

We assess, via system GMM, how Stock Flow Adjustments (SFA) affect the debt-to-GDP ratio in 65 countries (covering developed and emerging and low-income countries) between 1985-2014. We find that SFAs positively contribute to the change in the debt-to-GDP ratio with a coefficient close to one....

Public debt has been rising markedly over the years, which suggests an increase in public expenditure financed by debt instead of taxation. There is no consensus on the economic implications of borrowing to finance public expenditure. We assess empirically the macroeconomic effects of public...

We assess how “big” government should reasonably be in a number of advanced countries. First, we will link the recent findings of Data Envelope Analysis on efficient public expenditure with the question of the size of the government. Second, we report descriptive analysis of various...

Using two measures of the fiscal position, the cyclically adjusted primary budget balance (CAPB) and the total budget balance, we assess the Twin Deficit Hypothesis for the Euro Area in the period 1995-2020. Furthermore, we estimate time-varying coefficients of the current account balance...

We investigate the effect on municipality spending efficiency of a local property tax reform, which reduced in 2008 the upper limit of the property tax. We compute municipality efficiency scores via data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) from 2005 to 2011, and then we rely in a panel data set to...

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...

We assess public finances solvency for Euro Area countries using quarterly data between 1999Q1 and 2020Q4. Through a country-by-country analysis, the answer to the title question is true. For most countries, (i) the primary budget balance reacts positively to the lagged public debt ratio and...

This chapter conducts a review of the literature dealing with overall public sector performance and efficiency, it defines a methodology to assess public sector efficiency and it creates a novel and large cross-sectional panel dataset of government indicators and public sector efficiency scores....

We evaluate the effects of structural tax reforms on government spending efficiency in a sample of OECD economies over the period 2007-2016. After calculating input spending efficiency scores, we assess the relevance for efficiency of narrative tax changes in a panel setup. We find that: i)...