Both the German federal as well as the general government recorded a surplus for the fourth time in a row in 2017. The fast consolidation after the Great Recession coincided with the transition period for the full introduction of the federal debt brake, which is sometimes interpreted as...

Currently fiscal policies in Germany seem to be in a very comfortable position and the German Debt Brake is regarded as an institutional precondition for this success and has been exported to the Euro area in the guise of the Fiscal Compact. In this paper we scrutinize German fiscal policies and...