Substantial fiscal consolidation was achieved under the aegis of the 2003 Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act. While deficits widened anew in 2008 and 2009, against the backdrop of the global financial and economic crisis, efforts to reduce them have resumed since. To ensure...

The challenge for fiscal policy in Slovakia is to achieve fiscal consolidation in a way which supports the fragile recovery and protects spending on areas which are important for re-embarking on a trajectory of high trend growth and underpinning a catch-up in living standards. While the recently...

In 2001, Chile was one of the first countries in the world to adopt a structural balance fiscal rule. This paper provides the foundations of the choice of the rule, its methodological design and its initial estimates for the period 1987-2000. The paper also includes a discussion about the use of...

We survey recent theories of public debt that incorporate political decision making in rich dynamic environments. These theories provide a new framework with which to interpret empirical evidence and to assess institutional reforms that may help control political inefficiencies. We discuss the...

Sovereign wealth funds exist in Russia for eight years. The Stabilization Fund was established in 2004 and later divided into the Reserve Fund and the National Wealth Fund. During this period the funds’ assets and functions changed significantly. The paper compares the actual uses of the funds...

The reform of the Stability and Growth Pact and the incorporation of “debt brake” rules into national legislation have heavily increased the importance of structural balances in economic policymaking in Europe. As defined by the European Commission, structural balances are calculated by...

This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

The aim of this study is to develop a new framework (V-L-D) for detecting the short term vulnerabilities in fiscal policy for the European Union countries. The methodology relies ontwo distinct indicators: one showing the vulnerabilities signalled by the size of the cyclically adjusted budget...

In this paper, we investigate the consequences of the rise in educational attainment on the US generational accounts. We build on the 1995 accounts of Gokhale et al. (1999) and disaggregate them per schooling level. We show that low skill newborns are characterized by a negative generational...

What is the size of quasi-fiscal operations and their impact on the overall fiscal balance and public debt in the Czech Republic? Is the recent increase in Czech fiscal deficits fully attributable to the business cycle, or are there non-cyclical factors in place? And last but not least, what are...