In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and great recession, many countries face substantial deficits and growing debts. In the United States, federal government outlays as a ratio to GDP rose substantially from about 19.5 percent before the crisis to over 24 percent after the crisis. In...

Ireland’s banking crisis, one of the most severe in the OECD area, and the associated economic recession have taken a heavy toll on public finances. Large public deficits have accumulated since 2008 and net public debt, which had been eliminated, has soared once again. The rapid deterioration...

During the economic and financial crisis, fiscal positions across the OECD countries deteriorated sharply. This raises the question of what level of primary deficit would ensure long-term sustainability and what degree of consolidation is needed. The purpose of this paper is to gauge the scale...

This paper sheds light on the scale of fiscal consolidation that will be needed toensure long-term sustainability and on the potential benefits of institutional reforms inmitigating budget pressures of social spending. Based on alternative scenarios, resultssuggest that, in several OECD...

New Zealand, like many other countries, is experiencing a changing demographic profile from one dominated by young people during the 20th century to one where the population is more evenly distributed across age groups. This has implications for the economy and society, including the...

This paper studies real-time measures of the output gap and fiscal policy stance estimates for EU countries. We construct a comprehensive real-time data set on fiscal forecasts and study whether there are systematic differences between the European Commission and IMF estimates of the output gap...

A budget deficit finds itself among the issues most often discussed in the field of the public finance. A budget deficit is influenced by factors of a varied character. It can result from excessive budgetary expenditure on the militarization of economy, on developed state administration,...

The surge in fiscal deficits since 2008 has put a renewed focus on the authors’ understanding of fiscal policy. The interaction of fiscal and monetary policy during this period has also been the subject of much discussion and analysis. This paper gives new insight into past fiscal policy and...

Should rational agents take into consideration government policy announcements? A skilled agent (an econometrician) could set up a model to combine the following two pieces of information in order to anticipate the future course of fiscal policy in real-time: (i) the ex-ante path of policy as...

The lack of budget transparency and projections accuracy have been among the determinants of the last four decades high deficit and debt, as the recent 2008-2009 economic crisis has highlighted. In order to improve fiscal policy process and budget transparency, the European Union (EU) stated...