In this paper, the focus lies on the way the German government spends, how it spends and what the connection between finance ministry and central bank is. The institutions involved in the process are identified and discussed. As a member of the Eurozone, Germany's national central bank is not...

This paper is linked to some recent attempts at including a non-capacity creating autonomous expenditure category as the driver and determinant of growth into Kaleckian distribution and growth models. Whereas previous contributions have focussed on taming Harrodian instability, generated by the...

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...

On the one hand, every official document about fiscal policy in Spain, and most orthodox academic papers argue that Spain has no "fiscal space" and that it should apply resolute actions to assure budget consolidation. On the other hand, Spain also had the second highest unemployment rate in the...

In his letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt Keynes (1933) wrote about "the technique of recovery itself". An increase in output is brought about by an increase in purchasing power, Keynes argues, which can come from three sectors: households, firms and government. Using the IS/MY...

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...

In the contemporary capitalism model and in relation to the functioning of the economy there is a counterproductive view of the state as an institution. This has led to a reversal of the hierarchy between the state and the private sector, since it subordinates states to markets. Fiscal policy...

The economy of the European Union has not recovered from the impact of the economic and financial crisis. Growth rates remain low and investment activity is weak. This questions current economic policies of the Economic and Monetary Union, known as austerity. In opposition to fiscal contraction...

This paper examines the emergence of private debt-led growth in Canada since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) by means of a growth regimes and macroeconomic policy regime assessment. Examining each of the four business cycles in the 1983-2020 period, roughly encompassing the entirety of the...

To handle the sovereign debt crisis in general and macroeconomic imbalances in particular the leading EU institutions (the Troika) adopted two broad approaches: The short-term approach is based on enhancing the Stability and Growth Pact and to imposing fiscal austerity on crisis countries. The...